Nuclear Bomb Hits Havana

Brian De Palma's in a snit over his epic bomb 'Redacted' tanking nationwide, and is now screening it at the Karl Marx theater in Havana.

But he's pouting because he couldn't get a visa from the State Department to travel to Cuba.

Poor thing.

HAVANA - Washington's trade embargo bars almost all Americans from coming to Cuba — but it can't keep U.S. films out.

Twenty-one full-length U.S. movies and 22 experimental American shorts are being shown as part of Havana's international film festival, which began Tuesday and runs through Dec. 14 at 23 movie theaters and video clubs across the city.

Most are independent flicks focusing on illegal immigration and the problems Latinos face in America, but movies by Hollywood heavyweights Brian De Palma and David Lynch are also being screened.

How about a movie showing the plight of Latinos in Cuba?

"You make an American film and you never expect it to be shown in Cuba," said Vivien Lesnik Weisman, a Cuban-American who will travel to Havana next week to present her documentary, "The Man of Two Havanas."

Finished prints of the U.S. films were sent to Cuba through Mexico or Canada, or through European distribution companies. But the U.S. government makes it quite difficult for American directors to present their work on the island.

De Palma's "Redacted," a fictional retelling of the real-life rape and murder of a teenage girl by U.S. soldiers, opened the festival at Havana's swank Karl Marx theater Tuesday night, but only after one of its Canadian producers read an apologetic statement blaming the director's absence on U.S. authorities.

"It seems my State Department could not offer me a visa," De Palma said.

Also showing is Lynch's powerful yet plot-devoid "Inland Empire."

Calls and e-mails to Lynch's representatives asking if he had sought permission from U.S. authorities to travel to Cuba weren't immediately returned.

The U.S. Treasury Department issues licenses allowing U.S. artists to travel to Cuba for public performances, but Bill Martinez, a San Francisco immigration attorney and producer, said there is reportedly a two-year backlog of performers seeking such permission.

"The numbers of U.S. (performers) are significantly down," Martinez said.

In Washington, a Treasury Department spokesman wouldn't comment on pending requests for licenses.

'Redacted' Biggest Bomb Ever?

This one didn't even need a thumbs up from a Kos Kid to go completely in the tank.

IT'S hard for Hollywood pacifists like Brian De Palma to capture the hearts and minds of America if Americans won't see their movies. While the public is staying away in droves from “Rendition," “Lions for Lambs" and “In the Valley of Elah," audiences are really avoiding “Redacted," De Palma's picture about US soldiers who rape a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, then kill her and her family. The message movie was produced by NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who insisted on deleting grisly images of Iraqi war casualties from the montage at the film's end. Cuban offered to sell the film back to De Palma at cost, but the director was too smart to go for that deal. “Redacted" - which “could be the worst movie I've ever seen," said critic Michael Medved -took in just $25,628 in its opening weekend in 15 theaters, which means roughly 3,000 people saw it in the entire country. “This, despite an A-list director, a huge wave of publicity, high praise in the Times, The New Yorker, left-leaning sites like Salon, etc. A Joe Strummer documentary [of punk-rock band The Clash] playing in fewer theaters made more in its third week," e-mailed one cineaste.

UPDATE: Instapundit links. Thanks! More also at Flopping Aces, Macsmind.

UPDATE II: Commenter Paul notes this review from Kurt Loder.

De Palma's use of an abominable crime as an emblem of U.S. conduct in Iraq is a gross insult to American soldiers who've never done such things — which is to say, the overwhelming majority of them. But the director thinks he's courageously lobbing a truth-grenade into the cultural conflict over the Iraq war, and no doubt he's hoping that any attendant controversy will help sell tickets. Recently, he's been trumpeting his own victimization by the great media-military war machine: Because the movie's distributor felt compelled to mask the faces in a collage of actual bloody bodies at the end of the film, De Palma claims that his own movie has been "redacted." It seems not to have occurred to him that the families of those dead people might resent his use of their identifiable corpses to score a facile political point.