Silly Little Country

No I Don't Plan to See the Movie Either

One thing that would surely turn my stomach is any hagiography of Ernesto Guevara - whatever the merits even of The Motorcycle Diaries, I could not watch it. The human at its centre hardly deserves to be considered as one.
Joe Lima shows in his two-part review that he is not thrilled about Steven Soderbergh's piece of nonsense - long four-hour plus piece of nonsense.
One concern is slightly artistic.

Benicio Del Toro, a talented actor, is miscast as Ernesto Guevara; he has none of the cocky swagger and sarcastic humor of the real Che. He looks chronically depressed throughout the film. No one would follow Del Toro’s Che, except to a pharmacy to make sure he refilled his Zoloft.

I did wonder about this - del Toro excels in seeming run-down. The sheer pleasure of slaughter and murder of his character might be hard for him to reach.
Lima finds a shred of truth in the movie.

However, a sliver of truth does manage to peek through the darkness of disinformation in a scene in which Guevara, asthmatic, undernourished, gaining no traction in his insurgency against the Bolivian government and unable to make his horse move another inch, slides off of the poor creature and begins stabbing her. (This event, by the way, apparently really happened). Some in the audience moaned empathetically, as if the whole thing was so, so sad: first, el Vaquerito, now the horse! Yes, the incident is sad, but it’s not merely sad. It’s abnormal, terrifying. What kind of sadist stabs a horse just because he can’t make it walk? The answer is this: the same kind of sadist that presides over a gulag in which executions are carried out with dreadful, cold efficiency.

Looking cool in a beret is a pretty minimal qualification for admiration. Needless to say, this hero to many appears on signs in the current wave of anti-Semitic demonstrations appearing throughout the West. Sad.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 6:03 PM