Title: Cuban Fury

Director: James Griffiths

Starring: Nick Frost, Rashida Jones, Chris O’Dowd, Olivia Colman

Dancing is the best therapy for melancholia, and director James Griffiths wisely picked the caliente-latino moves to help the main character face his childhood fears.

 

Former teen salsa champion Bruce Garrett (Nick Frost) is now a sad-sack engineer. But his passion for dancing – repressed as a child because of a bullying incident – is reignited by his crush on his bewitching new boss Julia (Rashida Jones) and the only way he can win her over is by mastering the art of dance.

 

This British romantic comedy sure has promise, with the brilliant performances of the charming daughter of Quincy Jones and former model Peggy Lipton, Rashida Jones, and all the well-established UK tragicomic actors, Nick Frost, Chris O’Dowd and Olivia Colman. However the plot in general is fairly unimaginative and predictable. Tender is the choice of giving the role of Bruce to the overweight Frost, who tackles the dance-floor with dignity. But he doesn’t possess the physique du rôle to be the convincing as the enflaming salsa dancer, despite he has the reiterated “Corazon,” (i.e. passionate heart required to be a bailarino cubano). Sadly enough the zero-to-hero Bruce would have been more appropriate handling a salsa for pasta rather than all those pirouettes. This is probably due to the television style direction (James Griffiths comes from the small screen) and the screenplay (written by Jon Brown), who opts for poorly wisecracking jokes.

 

Nonetheless, Frost and the entire cast have a rather engaging screen presence and manage to save the enticing story of an ugly duckling, who doesn’t need to turn into a swan to deal with the skeletons in his closet, but only the power of love.

 

Technical: B

Acting: B

Story: C

Overall: B-

Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Cuban Fury Movie Review

By Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi, is a film critic, culture and foreign affairs reporter, screenwriter, film-maker and visual artist. She studied in a British school in Milan, graduated in Political Sciences, got her Masters in screenwriting and film production and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles. Chiara’s “Material Puns” use wordplay to weld the title of the painting with the materials placed on canvas, through an ironic reinterpretation of Pop-Art, Dadaism and Ready Made. She exhibited her artwork in Milan, Rome, Venice, London, Oxford, Paris and Manhattan. Chiara works as a reporter for online, print, radio and television and also as a film festival PR/publicist. As a bi-lingual journalist (English and Italian), who is also fluent in French and Spanish, she is a member of the Foreign Press Association in New York, the Women Film Critics Circle in New York, the Italian Association of Journalists in Milan and the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean. Chiara is also a Professor of Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at IED University in Milan.

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