Word: che
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...There could be two, three, many opinions and interpretations of this strange and daunting experiment, in part because of its length: 4-1/2hrs., quite possibly the longest movie in the history of U.S. commercial films. (Che opens today in New York City as a single film in two parts and an intermission; it will play as separate films when it gets a wider release...
...Some people will question screenwriter Peter Buchman's narrow focus on two military campaigns - the successful rebellion that led to the taking of Havana, Guevara's disastrous operation in Bolivia nine years later - while ignoring Che's role in mass executions in Cuba after the revolution and his ill-advised adventures in West Africa (where Egypt's Nasser correctly predicted Guevara would be coming in as Tarzan among the natives). Others will wonder at the odd lack of dramatic incident among all the warfare. But you really can't argue with Buchman and Soderbergh about the movie they didn...
...judgment is that the two-part 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...
...clout to get his projects off the ground and the work ethic to make them quickly: Che is his ninth feature this decade - ninth and tenth, if you count this double feature as two films - 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. If his name were taken off his films, sophisticated viewers would be hard pressed to locate a visual or thematic through-line...
...Che Pasa...