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GetPapa Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

charlytully I was multi-tasking today, dividing my attention between the live broadcast of Super Bowl 43 (Pittsburgh 26, Phoenix 23) and this movie, titled as THE GALINDEZ FILE on my DVD box. While the football game was more exciting than most, this flick made it look like a "yawner." Though both were real life attractions, the ball players were risking bruises while the characters in the movie--a true life story (see one of my sources in my comment summary)--were facing the much greater stakes braved by any politically active U.S. citizen: death by torture in a foreign country at the capricious whims of innumerable Cheney- and Rumsfeld-like thugs and their countless mercenary henchmen. Does this mean every American do-gooder will be tortured to death in the full bloom of youth? No. Is it inevitable that your neighborhood organizer will be rubbed out this way? No. (He might even become president.) But no matter who is president, the thousands of evil-doers who make up the "shadow government" (call them black ops, loose cannons, blackwater, off-the-reservation, CIA, FBI, ATF, NSA, homeland security, what have you) "disappear" enough of the innocents they disagree with every year that 90% of the would-be Christians are turned into the "lukewarm" sort the Bible says will burn in hell. These individual stories happening during the Bush years all have been dismissed as "liberal" propaganda by the Limbaughs, O'Reillys, Becks, and Savages of the world. But this sort of thing has been happening for 150 years, with the minions of money ("the love of money is the root of all evil") on one side, and the usually poor (often Christian, Southern, and/or conservative) patriots fighting for truth on the other.This GF movie is a case in point. The composite instrument of the U.S. money men's shadow government--Edward Robards (a well-cast Harvey Keitel) is a game player (specifically, chess). He has absolutely no more feeling for the bystanders brushing too close to his dirty work--past and present--than he does for the wooden pawns in his chess set. After engineering the rendition of a Ghandi-like spiritual cousin of Che Guevarra (Jesus Galindez) from his Columbia University classroom in New York City to his death-by-torture cell in the Dominican Republic, at least four people--including three Americans--had their life snuffed out with the U.S. tax dollars of the day so these "intelligence" people did not have to worry that their dastardly deeds would catch up to them, disrupting their life of exotic resorts, booze, and "professional women" (your tax dollars at work). The main difference between an actual documentary without compelling actors and this fictionalization is that a couple of the Galindez assassination "cover-up" assassinations are moved forward from the late 1950s to 1988, so that the woman victim--history grad student Muriel Colber (Saffron Burrows)--does not seem so remote from the 21st Century. Also, poetic license is taken to make her fate perfectly parallel to her research subject's, with almost as deft and chilling a result as that achieved by the incomparable French director George Sluizer in 1988's SPOORLOOS (aka, The Vanishing).

lastliberal Saffron Burrows (Wing Commander, The Loss of Sexual innocence) gives a good performance in a film that is predominately talk about the disappearance of a Basque Nationaliost who managed to alienate Fascist Dictators Franco and Trujillo. Make one angry and you have trouble, but two? That's death.Harvey Keitel plays the CIA(?) agent who goes around cleaning up the mess after Burrows starts writing a Dissertation on the disappearance, which was likely aided by the US Government.Guillermo Toledo (Crimen Ferpecto) plays her Spanish boyfriend who carries on her work after she, too, is assassinated for sticking her nose in the business of the CIA and their fascist friends.The film uses most of the evidence known about Galindez, played by Eduard Fernández, who also was a supporting actor in a film that, like Galindez, has disappeared (Alatriste). Where is Alatriste? Cuban actor Enrique Almirante was brilliant as a slimy dictator.

Jorge Sturla (sturlaferrer) I know, it's a movie. But when it comes to portray real life (in any matter) it should be as faithful as possible. I'm sorry, but "El Misterio Galíndez" isn't as accurate as it seems. Nor is the Dominican Republic depicted as it really is. In fact, it shocked me to see that the filming location for Santo Domingo was actually Cuba. And incredibly enough, movies with Cuban themes (Havana, The lost City, Bitter Sugar, The Godfather part II) were actually filmed in Santo Domingo! So what happened here? Why did they shoot the movie in Cuba instead of the D.R.? The Spanish dialogs with the Cuban accent are horrible! Those are not Dominicans! On the historic level, Galíndez would have never been hanged. He might as well been shot, decapitated or died from the inhumane torture he'd been receiving. Then, thrown his body in the Caribbean sea. But Trujillo would have never ordered death by strangulation. His sick mind wouldn't have allowed it.Acting isn't delivered as expected. Harvey Keitel looks like he's just expecting a paycheck. I prefer the leading actress in "Deep Blue Sea". The rest of the cast would have been excellent in some Cuban movie, and the same goes for the selected shooting location.I suggest "La fiesta del chivo" (The feast of the goat), from bestselling author Mario Vargas Llosa, directed by his cousin Luis Llosa. It's a bit more realistic with Dominican history. The Trujillo character is very well portrayed, and the Galindez incident is treated very briefly in this movie.

walterlx This movie showed here in Los Angeles last night as part of a festival of New Spanish Cinema. Jesus de Galindez was a Basque nationalist who lived in the Dominican Republic after leaving Spain. And then after leaving the Dominican Republic for the United States he wrote a book exposing the Trujillo dicatorship. For this he was kidnapped and taken to the Dominican Republic where he was brutal tortured and killed.The movie uncovers his life through the oddysey of a young woman from the United States who does research on his life, only to find doors blocked everywhere, and false open doors as well. Harvey Keitel plays the US government agent (it's unclear if CIA or FBI) whose assignment is to prevent the facts about Washington's role in the disappearance of Galindez from coming out. Keitel plays this role to a T.At 126 minutes, it's somewhat overlong, and the performance by the actress playing protagonist is a bit goggle-eyed and wooden, but it's a fine movie. Interestingly, it's a bilingual movie, with parts of the dialogue in English, with Spanish subtitles, and in Spanish with English subtitles. It's also fascinating to listen to the different accents in Spanish by many of the characters.