Anyone seen "The Lost City"?

Aside from being the NRO's favorite film that isn't World Trade Center, is it actually any good? (Also, if it portrays the Batista regime as some sort of happy collection of niceness with maybe one meanie, to hell with it.)

I rented it this afternoon; will report back later.

I haven't seen the Godfather movies, and I could still tell Lost City was piggybacking on them. Does the NRO crowd note that Batista is portrayed as laughably vain and attended by a sycophant?

Alfred: Have you seen I Am Cuba?

i saw this, unwillingly. it was so weird i cannot even describe it!

A.V. Club DOES NOT WANT:

The Lost City's sketchy characterizations and florid, overheated dialogue might be excusable if the film were more politically sophisticated, but its take on Cuban history feels simplistic. Batista comes off as little more than a preening metrosexual, while Castro and Guevara register only as broadly sketched heavies, overgrown children playing at being revolutionaries. Even their beards somehow look unconvincing. Garcia's romance with a lusty widow attracted to the revolutionaries' passionate rhetoric and fetching berets plays like an afterthought, while the usually dependable Garcia delivers one of his stiffest, least charismatic performances. As a director, Garcia is such a sucker for gratuitous crosscutting and glossily elliptical filmmaking that viewers can be forgiven for mistaking Lost City for a 143-minute montage sequence.

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/48049

Hmm. I agree with most of the AV review. But please note:

(1) Andy Garcia IS usually stiff and uncharismatic (Soderbergh exploited this for comic effect in the Oceans movies.

(2) The film is a honeyed reverie. Reminded me at its best of Hou Shiao-Shien's talent for presenting moments of chronological incongruity so as to stress the tension between memory and nostalgia.

(3) In the film Batista is much more than a preening met (and much less: he's like John Gielgud in Caligula). He runs a secret police! His goons shoot suspects in the head after an unsuccessful interrogation! He's got man-tits!

(4) Garcia the director is rather good when instructing the actors to tease and ricochet the good Cuban novelist Gabriel Cabrera Infante's purple dialogue – initially (a tense scene between Dustin Hoffman's Meyer Lansky and Garcia). In the last third it gets ridiculous. Sample: "Havana is like a rose. It's got petals and thorns, but you still want to hold her close."

(5) Bill Murray?!? WTF?

Once you accept the Garcia character's passivity as a necessity (the revolution comes, and all the apolitical Garcia wants to do is run his cabaret and flirt badly with his sister-in-law) the film is okay to pretty good. There's rather too much music (it's excellent though).