Damn, it’s like the Interweb is reading our mind! Earlier this morning we debated whether we should report that the New York Film Festival is running September 26 – October 12, but it’s been up on the website for sometime now, so we figured, it was old news. A few weeks earlier we were wondering what was up with the status of Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” biopic and debated whether we should post about this Jeffrey Wells update on the film’s troubled life during wartime at Cannes ’08, but it didn’t say much more than, “these problems still persist.”
Well, our friends at Spout (via Vulture) are suggesting that “Che” could be playing the NYFF ’08 despite nothing being officially announced yet, but they’ve got some strong evidence to support their theory (we hear NYFF announcements are imminent). Color us psyched if this is true! It seems that the film has been sold to HBO (this makes a lot of sense, it would be easier to absorb in two sittings on television for the average person, it could be like a TV mini-series event).
Opinions on “Che” at Cannes were polarizing. Some loved it, some thought it was way too long and laborious – it’s essentially two films with about a four and a half hour running time – but star Benicio De Toro did with the Cannes prize for Best Actor and it was the talk of the festival.
Spout do some great sleuthing! Check this synopsis of the work from Vulture:
A Film Comment magazine teaser for the [fall] issue, [had] a “special New York Film Festival preview,” [including a profile of Che‘s Benicio Del Toro. By yesterday morning, Film Comment‘s Webmaster had erased the preview, but it lives on in the page’s Google cache, and in a screen-cap in Longworth’s post.
For evidence from Spout’s Karina Longworth. “The cover of the September/October issue of Film Comment has not been not given to a film set to play the New York Film Festival since 2004.”
Vulture also say that Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” and Oliver Assayas’s “Summer Days” are likely going to be among the films screening at the festival. God, would we be able to see the original ‘Che’ that screened at Cannes?? This is certainly the most exciting news we’ve heard in a month. Please, let this be true! (Certainly looks that way and again, kudos to Spout for the spot-on digging).