Milestone's I Am Cuba.

"The only thing that's missing from what may be the DVD release of the year, which comes to us inside a makeshift cigar box, is an actual Cuban cigar." At Slant, Ed Gonzalez opens up Milestone's I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition.

"Still, in my experience, the movie bedazzles regardless of its condition or format," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC News. "[T]here's just no acclimating to, or being blasé about, the famously superhuman cinematographic stunt work and the unearthly white-wheat-dark-sky exposures (achieved with infra-red stock), all of it mated to an unfettered revolutionary outrage that abstractly details life before and during Castro's rebel war, from decadent tourist pool parties to police brigade atrocities to guerrilla righteousness in the mountains."

Updated through 11/22.

It's "a stylistic exercise so inventively extravagant that it still provokes gasps of amazement," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "The Soviet government had commissioned the director Mikhail Kalatozov, whose 1957 Cranes Are Flying was one of the few postwar Soviet films to attract international attention, to create a stolid, Socialist Realist monument to the Cuban Revolution; what it got instead was an avant-garde freakout that continues to cast a spell over filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson."

"Disc two offers a fascinating 90-minute Brazilian making-of docu called The Siberian Mammoth," notes the DVD Savant. "Disc Three contains a two-hour docu on director Mikhail Kalatazov, featuring lengthy input from Claude Lelouch and many film clips. As with many another Soviet director, Kalatazov's career veered between 'accepted' status and long periods when he'd be forbidden to work because of perceived ideological flaws in his work. Finishing off the disc set is an insert booklet containing Milestone founders Dennis Doros and Amy Heller's annotated account of the film's eventual rediscovery."

Update: "What's most impressive about I Am Cuba is how effectively dialectical the film is." Dave McDougall illustrates his case at Chained to the Cinémathèque.

Update, 11/22: "In truly socialist fashion, Kalatozov and his screenwriters decided that no one character in their film would be more significant than any other; Cuba, rather, would be the star of the show," notes Josh Rosenblatt in the Austin Chronicle. "[T]here's no denying the daring at the heart of a film that laughs so loudly at convention." This set does "a convincing job of making the case for I Am Cuba as one of the most important artistic achievements of the last 50 years."

Posted by dwhudson at November 20, 2007 5:23 AM