As Good As It Gets

Admirable film.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

One of the ideas behind communism was that the genders were supposed to be equal. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's "Hasta cierto punto" ("Up to a Certain Point" in English) looks at how far that was coming in Cuba. The movie focuses on a theater director who falls for a female dockworker, but his machismo complicates their relationship. The main point that I derived from the movie is that ingrained cultural values can't get legislated away. Much like how anti-discrimination laws won't wipe out racism, the institutionalized gender equality that came about in Cuba after the revolution didn't abolish men's macho attitudes towards women. Can these things EVER get fixed?! Anyway, it's a good movie. Gutiérrez Alea, known as Titón to his friends, was representative of the 1960s-1970s movement known as New Latin American Cinema. He later directed "Strawberry and Chocolate" (the first Cuban movie to deal with homosexuality).