Word: che
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CHE PASA...
...preview stories on Cannes, some movie each year is referred to as the most eagerly anticipated of the festival. There should be another category - most acutely dreaded - and this time that was Che. At an announced running time of 4hr.28min. (it wound up at about 4hr.20min.), and with the madly idiosyncratic Benicio Del Toro as his star, the film wasn't promising so much as it was threatening...
...star action spectacle (Ocean's) and the defiantly obscurantist conundrum (Schizopolis). His films can toady to an audience's prejudices (Erin Brockovich) or virtually say, "Don't watch me" (Bubble). He has the clout to get his projects off the ground and the work ethic to make them quickly: Che is his ninth feature this decade, not including shorter films and the TV series K Street. And he doesn't just direct his own films, he photographs them (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). Yet Soderbergh seems defined more by these giant, wayward ambitions than by a discernible authorial personality...
...Che is a halfway movie: too expensive (reportedly $61 million) to be relegated to art houses, too stiff and forbidding to appeal to any part of a mass audience. In its Cannes gestation it was presented in two parts (though neither part bore an official title here), each slightly more than two hrs.: The Argentine, which covers Guevara's role in Fidel Castro's 1958 campaign across the Cuban jungle, ending in the flight of President Batista and the ascendency of Castro (Demian Bichir); and Guerilla, detailing Che's failed, ultimately fatal attempt to bring revolution in Bolivia...
...Soderbergh must have figured he had a story that would take 4 hours to tell and, dammit, that's the movie he'd show here. So the running time is not the problem of this honorable, doomed effort; it's that so many scenes are repetitions of earlier ones. Che has to instill military discipline in his ragtag rebels in Cuba, then in Bolivia; in both places he has to decide whether to accept underage volunteers; in both, he gives his men a chance to quit before the decisive battles, where they are fired on by unseen regular soldiers...