The Che lie lives! Hollywood dahlink Steven Soderbergh is going full steam ahead with not one but two films about "Latin American revolutionary" Che Guevara. Why not Baby Doc, Pol Pot, Idi Amin? What is it about Che? The fashionable french beret cocked sidewise on his barbaric, murdering head? Hollywood, dangerous idiots. hatip Abu Daboo Du
Steven Soderbergh is finally ready to make his long-gestating biopic of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.
And the film's backers are betting that Guevara, who continues to sell books and T-shirts almost 40 years after his execution in Bolivia, has an aura large enough to sustain two films.
Soderbergh will shoot them back to back, using mostly Spanish dialogue. Production begins next May in Mexico and other South American locations.
Benicio Del Toro will play Guevara, and Javier Bardem, Franka Potente and Benjamin Bratt are in talks to play key roles. Producer is Laura Bickford, who began working on the project with Del Toro and Soderbergh right after they made "Traffic" together.
There is a great Che site that Stevie ought to be clubbed with here, Che Guevara Lies;
Who said this? "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become ..." Can you say, El Che.
The henchman of Fidel Castro's "Cuban Revolution," is a romantic cult hero once described by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte as "not only an intellectual,
but also the most complete human being of our age." In a just world, however, a complete Che Guevera portrait would include an executioner's soundtrack. As a biographer wrote: "... Che, as supreme prosecutor, took to his task with a singular determination, and the old walls of the fort rang out nightly with the fusillades of the firing squads."
Instead, we are gagged with Che, the young, handsome doctor, whose only fault seems to be having been born with asthma. Che Guevera was killed 38 years ago and, in death, his history has been turned into a myth that culminated in the 2004 "Motorcycle Diaries," executive produced by Robert Redford.
The movie was an ode to the young Che's South American journeys as a 20-something idealist. Never mind who he was to become. As writer Anthony Daniels has noted, "It is as if someone were to make a film about Adolf Hitler by portraying him as a vegetarian who loved animals and was against unemployment. This would be true, but ... rather beside the point."
The movie was an ode to the young Che's South American journeys as a 20-something idealist. Never mind who he was to become. As writer Anthony Daniels has noted, "It is as if someone were to make a film about Adolf Hitler by portraying him as a vegetarian who loved animals and was against unemployment. This would be true, but ... rather beside the point."
Che Guevera attracts the same undeserved hero worship as "Uncle Fidel" Castro, who Hollywood also adores. The cult of Che only promises to grow when Oscar-winner Benicio del Toro plays him in an upcoming Steven Soderbergh movie, set to start filming in the new year.
Unfortunately, Che chic isn't a meaningless fad. It's not nothing to those who suffered or died under Che's hand. And it's not harmless when you consider those citing Che today. A presidential candidate in Bolivia -- a country where "only images of the Virgin Mary are more ubiquitous, and even then it's a close-run thing" -- recently told The New York Times Magazine, "I like Che because he fought for equality, for justice. He did not just care for ordinary people; he made their struggle his own."
Any reference to Che and "struggle" should include the labor camps and executions he inflicted on the Cuban people, and the tyranny he helped establish to oppress them. Something got severely lost in translation from firing squads to T-shirts and the Oscars..
Another excellent Che Che site to visit here;
