Andy Garcia is Lorca :)

Time for the third installment of "January is actors-I-like month" and my choice is ... Andy Garcia. Here's a little about him from Wikipedia ...

Andy García (born Andrés Arturo García; April 12, 1956) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor ..... born in Bejucal, La Habana Province, Cuba ..... When Garcia was five years old, the family moved to Miami, Florida after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. Over a period of several years they built up a million-dollar perfume company. García was raised as a Catholic and attended Miami Beach Senior High School, where he played on the basketball team. During his last year in high school he became ill with mononucleosis, which convinced him to pursue a career in acting. García began acting at Florida International University, but soon went to Hollywood ....

Here are a few of the movies I've liked him in .....

The Untouchables (1987)
This film starred Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, and Sean Connery and was directed by Brian De Palma, the script adapted by David Mamet. As everyone knows, it tells the tale of how G man Eliot Ness brought down gangster Al Capone during the Prohibition era. Garcia played a mamber of Ness' team, Italian-American George Stone, chosen from the police academy for his marksmanship. A pretty good movie, though violent, and I'm still impressed by the courage of the real-life guys.

Black Rain (1989)
This was kind of a B movie, I guess, and it got some criticism for Japan-bashing, but I can still remember going to see it with my mom so I'm fond of it :) It starred Michael Douglas as an ethically challenged but basically good New York City police officer (Garcia played his partner) who arrests and then escorts back to Japan a member of the Yakuza. Once he and his partner get there, the bad guy gets away and everything goes very south. Here's a YouTube of the trailer ....



Dead Again (1991)
This movie, while not all that good, is memorable for being Kenneth Branagh's attempt at the American Noir genre. It stars Branagh as an LA private detective who helps an amnesia-afflicted woman (played by his then wife Emma Thompson), with flash-backs of them both as other people back in the Hollywood of the 40s, entwined in a murder mystery .... yep, we're talking reincarnation :) Robin Williams has a small part as a defrocked psychiatrist and Andy Garcia plays a newspaper reporter who is alive both in the 40s and the present and who has pertinent clues to the solving of the murder. Here's the trailer for this film ....



The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca (1997)
I haven't seen this film, but I thought I'd mention it because how many movies do you get to see about famous poets? Here is Roger Ebert's review of the movie (3 stars) .....

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Near the beginning of "The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca,'' a teenage boy attends an opening night in Madrid, Spain, in 1934--a performance of a work by the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. Twenty years later he recalls, "That night I learned that poetry could be an act of violence.'' Backstage, he is introduced to the poet, who asks, "How old are you?'' "Fourteen,'' he replies. "So am I,'' says the poet, adding, "Remember me.'' Not long after, Garcia Lorca is dead, another victim of the Spanish Civil War. He had thought perhaps he was too visible to be assassinated by the forces of the fascist rebel Franco, but he was wrong. And ever since there has been a veil of mystery over questions of how Garcia Lorca was killed, and by whom.

This movie, based on two books by Ian Gibson, is a reconstruction and speculation, told through the eyes of the boy, Ricardo, who moves with his family to Puerto Rico and tells his father one day in 1954 that he intends to return to Spain and try to find out what happened. For his father, all of that is in the past, and, with Franco still in power, best left there. But the boy, now grown to manhood and played by Esai Morales, returns anyway, and begins to unravel the secrets of the death.

Garcia Lorca, played by Andy Garcia, is seen in the movie as an artist whose very existence is a challenge to the insurgents. What is often forgotten about Spain, because it reverses the usual pattern, is that the elected government was left-wing, and the rebels were fascists; Franco was supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and the air battles in Spain were seen by historians as a dress rehearsal for the Luftwaffe.

To the rebels, the famous poet was a symbol, and his poetry like a red flag at a bullfight. But Garcia Lorca was also well-connected, with influence, with powerful friends. There is a scene where he strides confidently from a house to where some military men are beating his friend; he thinks his prestige will be enough to stop them, but he is wrong, and a fascist goon named Centeno (Miguel Ferrer) slugs him in the stomach. Garcia Lorca does not quite realize even after this event that his society has changed fundamentally, that a new class is taking power, that he is doomed.

Returning to Spain in 1954, Ricardo meets a publisher named Lozano (Edward James Olmos), who is bringing out a handsome edition of Garcia Lorca's works. "But ... didn't you arrest him?'' Ricardo asks. Lozano replies, "You're a brave man, Ricardo. No one else has been brave enough to say that to me.'' Lozano did sign the arrest order, and was possibly present at the death, along with others who would now rewrite their roles in history.

The lesson apparently is that the poets who are alive are a threat to repression, but dead poets can be safely embalmed as national treasures or legends. The film is also about how the secrets of the past still hold their power for revenge, if they are exposed, and in 1954 there are many people still alive who know how and why Garcia Lorca was killed--people whose current lives cannot accommodate that knowledge, so that Ricardo's quest is a threat.

Ricardo enters a Madrid where there are suspicious eyes and ears everywhere, and a taxi driver (Giancarlo Giannini) may be a friend, or a spy. Where nothing is simple, and people who thought they had sufficient reason in 1934 to side with the fascists and the Third Reich no longer wish their association to be recalled. The movie is a murder investigation, really, except that Ricardo will also be discovering things about his own origin that he does not suspect.

Do people read Garcia Lorca today? Or poetry in general? Not many, I suppose. I read some of his poems after seeing the movie, and felt the passion. But Garcia Lorca is perhaps more important today as a symbol than as a poet, and this film is really not so much about him as about memory and history--about how poets are given most of their power not by those who love them, but by those who fear them.

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