Word: almost
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...Video games aren’t completely recession-proof. The North American market almost collapsed due to oversaturation after 1983. But the industry is certainly in a much better position than Hollywood, which faces a unique problem in this recession because it has become far too easy to get access to content for free online. Fewer people will continue to pay for cable when they can watch TV shows online for free, which has become widely available legally. With games, illegal downloading is a non-issue, since most titles are far too complex to stream...
...enlivened by the guest appearances of familiar actors, sometimes cast appropriately (Lou Diamond Phillips as Mario Monje, Catalina Sandina Moreno as Che's second wife), sometimes not (Matt Damon as a priest-negotiator in Bolivia!?). But the major burden falls on its star, who nurtured the project for almost a decade. And Del Toro - whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof, thinking there's nowhere to go but up - is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one pungent confrontation...
...this is an earnest of Soderbergh's doggedly naturalistic, antidramatic approach here, which is admirable but enervating. The conflicts are almost entirely between Che and his men, between the platoon and their forest environment. Spending up to a year in the jungles of either Cuba or Bolivia, the soldiers seem trapped in some tropical Blair Witch Project, stripped of the scary bits. And forgive me for asking, but with all these young men separated from their girlfriends for such a long time, why (with one rapacious exception) do they never express any interest in women? The movie lets you infer...
...Ebert wrote this in 1969, in a review of the flop Hollywood bio-pic Che!, with the not-very-Latin Omar Sharif as Guevara. Yet most of Ebert's denunciations apply to Soderbergh's movie, which dispenses with the exclamation point - and with almost all of the compelling, sometimes contradictory drama in Che Guevara's life...
...shouldn't come as any surprise that, in the wake of the shocking allegations against Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, observers almost immediately evoked the Windy City's rich, colorful history of corruption. But after a couple of days Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, the son of the man synonomous with cronyism and backroom Chicago politics, wasn't about to let the comparisons go unchallenged. At a Wednesday press conference, a subdued Daley, who is bidding to land the 2016 Summer Olympics, went out of his way to distance himself and his city from the stain of the burgeoning scandal...