La Opinion‘s Josep Pareda interviewed me yesterday (or was it Wednesday?) for a piece posted today about Che‘s distribution troubles.
The piece is in Spanish, of course, so I managed a rough English translation via Google language tool. The headline — Che busca distribuidor — obviously means “Che looking for distributor,” and the subhead says that “the film with Benicio del Toro arrives in Toronto with no release date in U.S.”
Here are the portions that deal with my comments:
“After its showing at Cannes, critical reactions varied between flattery — manifesting in the film’s absolute defense by Jeffrey Wells, one of the most prominent scholars of cinema on internet thanks to its essential page Hollywood Elsewhere — and skepticism.
“Wells told HolaLA! “I was not bored by a single minute [of Che]. This is not a traditional drama. There is no emotional revelation. It does not employ any of the conventional tricks or cathartic moments: Where’s the girl, where they crying? None of this happens. The film is operating on a higher level than that. It basically lets you feel what it was like to hang with Che during the two most intense chapters of his life.”
But “the idea is to absorb both as if it were a feast. I knew this when I read the two scripts and realized it was an up-and-down epic like Lawrence of Arabia. The first part is the triumph and the second is when [the character] loses common sense . Now, could one see Lawrence of Arabia in two parts? Theoretically yes, but why? It was not made with that intention. ”
And yet dividing Che into two parts “seems to be consensus,” said Wells, who at the same time assured that while this wasn’t director Steven Soderbergh‘s intention or current wish, “It would not be the end of the world.”