Word: soderbergh
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 for us." A younger man walked past the theater wearing a Che t-shirt - the iconic branding...
...days later, Soderbergh and his star, Benicio Del Toro, presented Che at the Havana Film Festival. The authorities had warned they would not allow the picture to be shown if it was critical of Fidel Castro, and they found nothing objectionable. (One scene included in the original Cannes Film Festival version of Che, showing Castro the commandante in an ambiguous light, was apparently cut.) "The Cuban public gave its endorsement with a strong ovation," reported Granma, the island's official Communist Party newspaper, which hedged its bets by observing that the Castro character (played by Demian Bichir) lacked "charisma...
...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't make; a viewer must accept that they meant these to be bold strategies, and judge what's on the screen...
...this for Soderbergh: among all contemporary American directors, he has the most restless ambitions. Since his debut film, the indie romantic comedy sex, lies, and videotape in 1989, he has won an Oscar (for directing Traffic), guided Julia Roberts to a statuette of her own (for Erin Brockovich) and launched an action-movie franchise (the Ocean's films). More important, he's let his interests range far and wide, across different genres and different kinds of movies: intellectual science fiction (Solaris), quirky ensemble comedy (Full Frontal) and defiantly obscurantist conundrum (Schizopolis). His films can toady to an audience's prejudices...
...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...