SnoopyStyle
In 1996, Ry Cooder and others assembled forgotten veteran Cuban musicians to form the Buena Vista Social Club. The original Club has long since gone. This movie has their recent performances. Individuals are interviewed about their struggles during tough times and their music.This is a time capsule in more than one way. It recalls the time when Cuba is starting to reach America. It's the hesitant start of a political thaw. The music itself is a throwback to an earlier time period. The musicians' stories are another throwback to another era. It can get repetitive as each musician gets his own section. The music is great. It's touching and funny when the men visit NYC for the first time. That is yet another time capsule as they look out onto the twin towers. This is a fine documentary.
Martin Teller
This is my first post-WINGS OF DESIRE Wenders movie, and despite all the hype around it at the time, my first experience with the music of the Buena Vista Social Club. The music itself is fantastic, featuring memorable and rich songs with accomplished musicianship and great passion. It was a pleasure to spend time with the players and learn a little bit (unfortunately, not a whole lot) about their lives and careers. However, the cinematography is simply awful. Undoubtedly there are limitations involved with filming in Cuba, but the use of early digital video cameras gives the movie a cheap, amateurish, washed-out look. It's very unpleasant to behold, especially with the shaky camera-work. It feels like it was all done rather haphazardly with little thought. You're probably better off just buying the CD.
chaos-rampant
Most documentaries these days are nothing more than masked narratives, some semblance of reality (often largely fictitious) structured as a story meant to grip. They grip and hold on to. This is not that type, although it's loosely a story. It's more properly a frame, a portal; into the lives of ageing Cuban musicians brought out of retirement and obscurity for one last round, recast as memory of a time and place.Like their music, the film is not about spine-tingling rhythms or crescendos. It is mostly a colorful lull with the sweet pull of a hot summer night. A pull into anecdotes about life in old Cuba and snapshots of the present one. We never get to know any of the players well enough, but we spend with them time enough to soak up the atmosphere of being there.Being there is what the movie is all about. The wise choice of digital video abets this, the palpable immediacy. Wenders' camera tricks are superfluous then, because the material doesn't need any mediating. The only thing required of the camera here is to transport us.And it does. Watching this, I felt like it was the first time I was seeing New York (when eventually the band flies there for one night of apotheosis at the Carnegie Hall). We walk the streets, also back in Cuba. Glimpses of life abound, some spontaneous others not so much. Wonderful architecture, colonial remnants wasting away with the last signs of a revolution heading south. A building sign reads "KARL MA X", the R missing and no one bothered to replace it. But we so rarely get to see these things in movies, that it's a breath of fresh air. But in order for the film to breathe into you, you need to have devoted part of yourself and have an affinity for untravellled cinematic space. For the place, despite the narrative. We get plenty of that here.
Andrei_Ciprian
This movie was a must for me, not for cinematographic reasons but for the piece of music history it contains. I had heard Ibrahim Ferrer was coming to Romania with Buenos Hermanos Tour. So I tried to find out all about the Buena Vista history. I have found Cuba a far away, resolute place, nevertheless glamorous and melancholic. Popular Cuban music is an absolute jewel that had to be forgotten even in its' own country and then brought back into the limelight by the likes of Cooder and Wenders. Cooder is a scavenger that wanders the exotic musical destinations for the next big hit. The film is centered too much on Cooder, and I find the time allotted to Ibrahim, Omara, Compay, Barbarito, Cachaito and the others (the real musical giants) unsatisfactory. You only get a glimpse and then have to run away for the next character... Yet, Wenders manages to catch the sweetness in the Cuban relaxed lifestyle, beautiful Rembrandt-like sunshine coming through leaves and a touch of history and relaxed musicians in the act of recollecting.
AD
