Word: del
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...sometimes cast appropriately (Lou Diamond Phillips as Mario Monje, Catalina Sandina Moreno as Che's second wife), sometimes not (Matt Damon as a negotiator in Bolivia!?). But the major burden falls on its star, who as one of the producers has 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 - is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one thrilling confrontation at the UN between Guevara and ambassadors from other Latin American countries...
...dyspepsia of Del Toro's performance is partly due to the bromides he has to enunciate - that the most important quality of a revolutionary is "love," and that he's not a Catholic but "I believe in mankind" - and partly because so little information is vouchsafed about his non-jungle career or his private life. (You're about 100 mins, into Part One before Che mentions in passing that he has a wife and child back home.) Halfway through the film he has lost much of the power and poignancy you might expect of such a character...
...With some 40,000 professionals in attendance, Cannes is the world's largest annual convention, and a yearly thermometer for the temperature of the seventh art. Some come for the deals (producers want to sell their movies to every market from Thailand to Tierra del Fuego), some for the glamour (the parade of beautiful people can give even the most jaded visitor a kind of whiplash of the eyes), some for the parties (free food! free wine! possible sightings of Clint and Brangelina!). But the 2,000 critics are here on a monastic mission. Renouncing the beaches and the usually...
...American items from Oscar-winning directors. This year Clint Eastwood brings Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, and Woody Allen has Vicky Christina Barcelona, with Oscar-winner Javier Bardem, Oscar-nominee Penelope Cruz and Woody's latest muse, Scarlett Johansson. Steven Soderbergh is presenting the 4-1.2-hr. Che, with Benicio del Toro as the sexy South American insurrectionist...