Word: guevaras
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There could hardly have been a stronger reaction at two early screenings of Che last week if Ernesto Guevara himself had shown up. (The old soldier would be 80, if he hadn't been killed in Bolivia in 1967.) In Miami Beach, a few dozen protesters, mostly pensioners who had fled Cuba after the Castro takeover on New Year's Day, 1959, protested the showing of Steven Soderbergh's bio-epic. "The Jewish community would never allow any kind of film about Hitler like this to play here," Abilio Leon, 65, told the Miami New Times. "It's the same...
...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...
...shot in the 2.35:1 scope ratio) is "more of an action film with big battle scenes," and the second part (shot in standard 1.85:1 wide-screen) is "more of a thriller." Actually, neither tag truly applies. Though Part 1 begins by hopscotching from 1955, when Castro and Guevara meet, to later scenes in Havana and New York, the film is far less interested in explaining Guevara's political importance than in showing how he operated in the two big campaigns; its mantra is process, not context...
...first half of Che unreels as inspirational history, the second half unravels as tragedy. Part 2 is essentially a remake of Part 1, with many scenes repeated. Guevara 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 and suffer the deaths of friends who've made their big speech or sentimental impression moments before. The film suggests that...
...This produces some jarring juxtapositions. Though he has built his career on dire warnings about the dangers of foreigners, Strache poses on his website as Che Guevara, donning the rebel's trademark beret and highlighting the last three letters of his name for anyone who misses the point. He praises Venezuela's left-wing demagogue Hugo Chavez and, in his campaign rap "Viva HC!", chants "Yes-We-Can" (in English), a reference to the campaign slogan of Barack Obama. That's an odd choice given that Strache is urging that some African immigrants be deported. "Austria! First!" he sings, backed...