The first Hollywood film to be shot in Cuba since Castro isn’t close but no cigar – the Ernest Hemingway biopic is an oceangoing embarrassmentPapa: Hemingway in Cuba holds the distinction of being the first Hollywood production to shoot on the island nation since 1959. But other film-makers looking to leave their label need not fret,as there’s still an opportunity to originate the first American film shot there since Fidel Castro came to power that isn’t a complete, mortifying embarrassment.
Papa is another biopic-through-the-lens of a young acolyte, and similar to the recent debacle Nina,though this time its screenplay was written by the witness himself. Giovanni Ribisi is Ed Myers (name changed from the late Denne Bart Petitclerc), a newspaperman in Miami in the late 1950s. Abandoned by his father at a young age, or as we’re told through lugubrious (mournful, dismal) narration,he turned to the books of Ernest Hemingway while looking for a father figure. He writes an impassioned note to Hemingway and one day he receives a phone call. “I got your letter. It’s a good letter,” Adrian Sparks’s Hemingway tells him, and as whether he didn’t see the parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation) of Hemingway in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris – or,worse, he did see it and used that as a guide. “You like to fish?”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com