I watched Che again last night and received the same fortifications, which made me feel wonderful. But the spiritual seep-through factor, truth be told, felt about the same as what I got from my second viewing in Toronto. So it’s a two-timer more than a threebie. Nothing wrong with that. It’s an incredible thing to sit through and let into your head and heart. I love this line of David Poland‘s — “Che is Brando to most biopics’ Heston.”
Che star Benicio del Toro prior to last night’s 6 pm showing of Che, which actually started about a half-hour late.
Che director Steven Soderbergh, Variety columnist Anne Thompson at Che after-party at Hollywood Social — Sunday, 11.2, 12:40 am.
But after talking with journo pals at the Che after-party, it appears that I’m still in the minority in my passions, save for the opinions of Poland, Kim Voynar and I don’t know how many others. Poland’s Toronto Film Festival review is one of the most mature and perceptive things he’s ever written.
The best line of the night came from CHUD’s Devin Faraci. Part one of Che, or the “upper” half which tells the story of the Cuban revolution of ’57 to early ’59 (and titled The Argentine), is a metaphor for the Obama campaign. (I was thinking this exact thought as I watched it last night.) And the second half about the calamitous Bolivian campaign (and called Guerilla) is a metaphor for McCain-Palin.
A 20something columnist who shall go unnamed faulted Che for not explaining who Guevara is politically and where he’s coming from as a man. That’s partly true — it would help to review the Che Guevara Wikipedia page before going to the film. Is that too much of a homework assignment for the gamer generation? Reading a Wikipedia page for 10 or 15 minutes? Probably.
But what does the above columnist’s opinion say about the education levels out there? You can point to ignorance about anything as a reason why you can’t get into this or that film. Where do you stop with that rationale? If you go into this film as a 100% uneducated overall-wearing No Time for Sergeants yokel, yes, you may not understand from the information in Che who Guevara really is deep down….but who wants to make a movie for yokels? We know the answer to that one, don’t we?
For its bracing aliveness and atmospheric transportation effect alone I have Che locked down in my head as one of the incontestably great films of the century so far, and by any yardstick one of the most profound exercises in atmospheric mood politics of all time. As well as (why stop there?) one of the great unconventional “non-dramatic” mass mind-fucks of all time. Culturally, politically and soulfully, Che is about as far away from the Che Guevara poster-and T-shirt marketing mentality as a Che Guevara film could be. I’m on my knees because of this distinction alone.
“The movie is, in many ways, a more-intimate-than-possible documentary (thus, a fictionalized narrative),” Poland wrote. “Instead of telling us things in dialogue or setting up dramatic moments that makes ideas obvious, Soderbergh & Co let Guevara and The Castros and the rest show themselves in the way people really show themselves — in small, human, real moments.
“They also force the audience to keep its awareness of the future events in check — first, what happened, but the future we all know stares us in the face. This is no revisionist history. There really is no effort to define the politics around these men, but simply to allow them to express what they felt they were doing or what they told others they felt they were doing.
“There is great effort to work, in both films, with the true experience of the men and women fighting the fight. This is one of the real feats of Soderbergh’s work here. Unlike The Hurt Locker, which does a great job of sharply defining the mechanics of the work of bomb defusing teams (which happen to be in Iraq), this detail is about the feel of the human effort, both on the side of the fighters we are watching and the rural people that they are navigating while also fighting national military forces.
“For people looking for a snap-and-slap testament to Che Guevara’s greatness or his hypocrisy or anything definitive, this will never quite work. It just isn’t a straight biopic. It has more in common with Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the second half of Kubick’s Full Metal Jacket than any more traditional war epics There is a bit of Patton, in conceit though not remotely in character, as well.
“Soderbergh and his collaborators have taken the story of Che’ Guevara to define their ideas much the way Robert Bolt did for Lean, though this film creates intimacy like Bolt created epics (though Lean hired actors who brilliantly undercut the stuffiness of Bolt to make most of their films together a perfect balance). Che is Brando to most biopics’ Heston.”
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Australia director Baz Luhrmann has described the frenetic last-minute editing process of his film to The Australian‘s Christine Jackman thusly: “We always thought it was extremely precarious. We’re going to give it our all and at the moment 11.26 is an absolutely real date. But I would not be truthful if I didn’t say it’s a little like landing a jumbo jet on an aircraft carrier in a storm.”
Jackman likens Luhrmann’s situation to “living in a mental asylum, and the clock is ticking.
“Across the globe in another time zone, studio executives are chewing their nails as they fret about bottom lines and box-office takes, for Luhrmann’s latest project, the somewhat cheekily titled Australia, is already setting the sorts of records that make Hollywood’s money men nervous.
“The longest shoot in 20th Century Fox’s formidable history of movie-making. The most expensive Australian film ever made.
“With an estimated budget of $130 million and rising, the alarm bells must be starting to sound as shrill as the ker-ching! of a thousand cash registers.
“Consider this: if Australia runs close to the 170 minutes that has been reported in the media, Luhrmann’s production company Bazmark will have spent roughly three-quarters of a million dollars of other people’s money for every minute of screen time. Ker-ching!
“But even that’s a big if, and therein lies the real problem. Because, with its much-vaunted release date just weeks away, on November 26, nobody has seen a final print of the film. Why? Because one doesn’t exist.”
Steven Soderbergh‘s Che shows tonight at the AFI Fest inside the big Chinese theatre, and I will be in attendance. This will be my third time and the honest-to-God truth is that I can’t wait to slip into it again. For me the Che experience is not unlike how Tom Wolfe once described the experience of settling into the Sunday New York Times — “that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls.”
Che, in other words, isn’t a pamphlet or a short story or tight three-act “movie” to be savored with a tub of popcorn and a “do it to me” attitude. It’s about luxurious feasting as long as you understand the kind of feast that it is. A big and filling one, certainly, in terms of realism and theme and transportation, but served without conventional “story”, patented emotionalism, movie moments, dessert, coffee, appetizers, waiters, napkins, brandy or any of your standard four-star restaurant perks.
Obviously I’m not mentioning Che‘s subject matter, cinematography, real-life history, performances, etc. I just can’t do it again. Not now anyway. I’ve written about it so many times it’s coming out of my ears.
The people who nip-nip-nipped into this film in Cannes will, I believe, someday eat their words. If, that is, the prevailing opinion trend, which I’m told is starting to move for Che after six months of Cannes after-effect, actually manifests. Among the guilds and the branches, I mean. In which case the nip-nippers will begin to pretend that they liked it all along.
Perhaps there is, in fact, some kind of positive counter-surge brewing among those who are not critics. In the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey, dumped on by big-city critics when it opened in April 1968, was saved by doobie-tokers. By this I mean people with the apparent capacity to enjoy a film that doesn’t do “drama” and just roll with what it is and what it does.
For me this boils down to the savoring of naturalistic experience, behavior, aroma — a kind of high-end movie versimilitude trip that isn’t trying to arouse and soothe in a campfire-tale sort of way but is strangely immersive all the same.
Che is a direct challenge to audiences,” declared L.A. Times guy Mark Olsen in a 10.31 article. “Depending on who you ask, Che is either Soderbergh’s greatest masterwork or his grandest folly.”
Che is so fully realized and so completely off on its own humid jungle trail that many don’t get what it’s doing. It is in no way a folly.
Seven weeks ago in Toronto Che producer Laura Bickford called it “this generation’s Lawrence of Arabia.” I made this analogy exactly two years ago, and have been flogging the Lawrence thing like a dead horse ever since. I said it in an April ’08 piece I wrote for the Huffington Post. I said it again in an interview in La Opinion.
IFC yesterday announced its release plans for the two-art epic. The entire four hour-plus version (with a half-hour intermission) will have a digital roadshow booking on 12.12 at Manhattan’s Zeigfeld and the Landmark in LA. The film will return to those two markets on 1.9.09 in two parts, expaninding into the top 25 markets on 1.16.09 and 1.22.09. On 1.21.09 both parts — titled The Argentine and Guerilla — will be available separately in both standard and HD via the company’s cable VOD platform. An exclusive Blockbuster home video release will follow.
Exclusive to Blockbuster? Those people are evil.
In the HuffPost piece, written last April, I wrote, “Hey, how about presenting the two films as a single, gargantuan Lawrence of Arabia-styled deal with an intermission, running between four or four and a half hours?” I was half-joking at the time.
I also wrote, “Given the indisputable fact that we are living in the most dumbed-down era of American moviegoing (certainly in terms of the mass audience) since the invention of the movie camera, how many popcorn-munchers are going to be willing, much less eager, to go four hours plus with Che Guevara? Especially given their reluctance to support even Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez‘s Grindhouse, a two-part, three-hour popcorn movie about hot women, zombies and car chases?”
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