Word: del
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...Steven Soderbergh's four-and-a-half hours detailing of Ernesto Guevara's two rebel campaigns in Cuba and Bolivia, was denied the Palme d'Or many expected, but Benicio del Toro, the film's indefatigable star, was named Best Actor. The Best Actress award went to Sandra Corveloni, who played the pregnant single mother trying to keep her poor family together in the Brazilian Linha de Passe, directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thompson. At the ceremony, Thompson revealed that Corveloni was herself pregnant and had just lost the child. She said the award would be balm...
...Indiana Jones team. The Riviera fortnight has been so stodgy that we almost welcomed a wild, four-and-a-half hour misfire like Steven Soderbergh's Che. But now our (my) patience has been rewarded, our (my) biliousness calmed. One good movie can do that. In 2006, Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth showed up on the last day, to prove there was life in the old medium yet. This year the savior is Charlie Kaufman's demanding, rewarding Synecdoche, New York...
...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...
...kitsch artist Jeff Koons is - much less why he's sharing a tribute with Helen Keller, Hans Blix and Jacques Cousteau. And you don't have to be a rabid (Groucho) Marxist to turn down membership in a club that includes murderous Central African Republic "Emperor" Jean-Bédel Bokassa...