Variety‘s Peter Bart has launched a gut-punch blog-ish thing that’ll probably seem preferable to his weekly Sunday column because it’ll bring out the primal stuff. Like this complaint riff about Steven Soderbergh‘s Che having failed to dramatize the brutality of the Fidel Castro regime once it took power in early 1959.

True — the movie doesn’t do this. Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Peter Buchman, obviously weren’t interested in going there. The movie’s basic scheme (i.e., showing a successful insurgency vs. showing one that failed) wouldn’t have accommodated depictions of firing squads and other cruelties, and in fact would have been diluted by same. Hey, Peter — how come David O. Selznick didn’t show Rhett Butler dodging the Union Army sea blockades in Gone With the Wind? And where were the depictions of debauchery between Butler and at least one of Belle Whatling‘s prostitutes?