CHE; A Movie Review

by Echo Park Community Coalition (EPCC

Thursday Feb 5th, 2009 8:48 AM

EPCC NEWS

February 5, 2009

CHE!

By Jerry Esguerra

Che movies are becoming the guide posts of my personal journeys - an assumption that I'm sure my fellow travelers will understand and if you're like me who was swept away by Guevarra's romanticism at a very young age, I bet you can book end your political life with distinct adaptations of the "guerilleros" life.

At least mine has to be moved a tad to the right to squeeze in another chapter - I saw Soderbergh's Part 2 last night at Sunset Plaza in the Westside.

The experience was serendipitous I must say. The first one was more of Soderbergh - patch work of imaginative frames moving in non-linear trajectory sneaking here and there with the Cuban pastoral scene as contra-basso - the second one, he totally distance himself from Godard.

It was a matter-of-fact, unadorned, take it or leave it, non-sloganeering narrative of Guevarra's Bolivia. Soderbergh didn't editorialize or politicize or polemicize, instead he scraped your eyeballs with his lens to show a man in an extreme state of contradiction with the elements.

It is Che at war with the mountains, the river, the trees and more often than once seemingly, with his own mortality. The scene of Che beating a horse - was that Quixote giving up his Quixotic quest? For the uninitiated maybe so. But for those who read the diary (I have a suspicion that is what Soderbergh was counting on) Guevarra didn't show any bitterness at all with his day to day struggle.

The grueling portrait of a guerrilla that Soderbergh painted over a hostile landscape makes any revolutionary think twice before plunging into such an employment, of course my asthma is not that bad.

But what I can never forgive Soderbergh for is letting Guevarra witness his own death as I sat there fidgeting in my seat, at least at my friend's Silverlake home where I saw the first part I can always excuse myself to get a beer if confronted with such an ugly scene.

Soderbergh should stay away from this genre. He should go back to that cocky and voyeuristic Sex, Lies and Vid.....or that highly formulaic hollywoodish Ocean 11.

He is way too good to be in this neighborhood.

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