Like the massiveness of “Che” the film, we had to cut our post about Steven Soderbergh’s two-part film into two posts. The first one had new photos from the film plus quotes from an extensive and excellent piece in the L.A. Times.
Here’s the newest trailer for “The Argentine,” but we have to say we rather hate it. We understand they have to try and sell the film, but it attempts to do everything predictable in it that Soderbergh went to lengths to avoid and the trailer does everything in its power to present the film as a traditional biopic which it’s clearly not.
As for critics who saw the film in L.A., Anne Thompson seemed slightly put off by the length, but still impressed by the achievement. “I still think Soderbergh could have wrestled ‘Che’ into submission at a more audience-friendly length. But all power to him. He’s never, ever dull.”
Jeffrey Wells has seen the films three times and he still loves them, god bless his heart. Thank god someone with a real voice (does anyone listen to us? ha) is championing this ambitious masterwork.Our favorite part of Wells’ recap is the 20something critic he alludes to, but doesn’t call out. It speaks to the ignorance we were talking about earlier. We’re kind of dying to know who this is.
“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.”
As we said in the comments section, anyone who even needs to look at Guevara’s wiki page to get a bead on where he’s coming from politically should be rather ashamed of themselves.
David Poland isn’t a critic we agree with much, but we’re in love with this line: “My first reaction to Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Che’ was absolute shock at the idiocy and arrogance of it all… that is to say, the idiocy and the arrogance of the responses from Cannes… ‘Che’ is Brando to most biopics’ Heston. “
As Poland notes, the film is “a challenge to today’s quick cutting and narrow idea movies,” which is why its so astonishing that critics are rebelling against that rebellion in conventional filmmaking.
This quote from Wells is one of the reasons we think he’s the best writer in the biz, even if he is a little kooky at times. “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.” Some critics are claiming those in favor of the film have had the “wool pulled over their eyes,” and to that we say their eyes weren’t open enough.
Hells, yeah. Anyhow, here’s the trailer, don’t judge it too hard. What it’s trying to achieve is counter intuitive to the filmmakers objectives which he nailed almost every second of the way. And note: if you scour the web you’ll see lots of trailers that say they’re for “Guerrilla,” the second part of the film set in Bolivia, but this is incorrect. Thus far there have been zero “Guerilla” trailers and all the versions so far have contained footage of “The Argentine” exclusively. If you see one that says, “Guerrilla,” it’s wrong and incorrectly labeled (like this one at Trailer Addict for example)., but this new trailer is actually a full-blown “Che” trailer with footage of both films [ed. oops, it stopped working for us yesterday so we didn’t have full chance to see it all the way through, we originally reported that this was just a trailer for “The Argentine,” but it’s actually one for both films.]