If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you’ll know that, as a work of stand-alone cinema, I am not crazy about Che. However, that doesn’t mean that I was anything but thrilled to hear that the Steven Soderbergh film sold out most of its weekend shows at the Ziegfeld in New York and the Landmark in Los Angeles. Here are five reasons why Che’s +$30k opening weekend per screen average is –– say it with me now –– Good For Cinema:

It validates IFC’s willingness to take chances on acquisitions. Over the past 18 months or so, as one studio has shut down their indie arms after another (and the Weinsteins have drifted off into virtual acquisitions irrelevance), IFC has picked up the buying slack, walking away with seven films at this year’s Cannes alone. There’s been some criticism that the company buys so many films that they can’t give each special attention, and when a much-praised film like The Pleasure of Being Robbed (one of those Cannes buys) is ushered out of the IFC Center after a single not-spectacular weekend, it’s easy to see how the rush instigated by the volume of product could get on the nerves of interested parties. But Che’s big weekend proves two things: a) the IFC team’s willingness to buy films that nobody else puts out is paying off, and b) they are capable of giving a product with special needs the individual concern that it needs. And speaking of the need to impress in a single weekend…

The roadshow concept puts first weekend mania to good use. When a festival acquisition opens and closes at the IFC Center after a single week, the filmmaker is disappointed, but IFC’s model of simultaneous distribution via Video On Demand means that the film itself is still able to reach viewers on a longer tail. On that model, the one week NY theatrical run serves as a generator for press for the VOD run. The Che roadshow takes that concept and explodes it: by making Che’s Oscar qualifying run an event, complete with an opening night appearance by Soderbergh (see below), IFC has created guaranteed interest for its planned 2009 release of Che as two seperate films. In part, because…

…the roadshow also puts a sense of confrontation back into film culture. The new At the Movies isn’t bad just because Ben Lyons is so bad (although he is so, so bad). It’s bad because the sense of conflict has been neutured. Any film worth a damn is going to inspire conflicting opinions; right now the only real public space for those clashes is the blogosphere, and the extent to which our back-and-forths are actually truly public at all is debatable. Friday night’s premiere of Che at the Ziegfeld, where the audience stuck around for a rowdy Q & A session with Soderbergh which stretched into the early morning hours and included audience member debate over whether Guevara was “a revolutionary” or “a murderer” (see the video above, via indieWIRE), proved that there’s still a chance for meaningful conversation and conflict about a film’s worth and intentions in the public sphere.

It gives auteurs with big ambitions hope. When Che appeared at Cannes, Variety’s Todd McCarthy mocked Soderbergh’s ambitions and wrote the endeavor off as a “commercial impossibility.” That, of course, was meant as a pejorative; again, I don’t like the film, but in relating my issues with it, I praised Soderbergh for making a film so obstinately indifferent to commercial concerns. It’s Variety’s job to assess a film’s future in the market,but in this case, they did it in a scolding way, imposing their own standard for success on a film made with different goals in mind. That Che seems to be finding its audience in spite of Variety’s assessment should hopefully give hope to other filmmakers that they can actually get away exploring uncompromised visions, as long as they temper their expectations.

Soderbergh may be breaking his own pattern. In the two decades since Sex, lies and videotape premiered at Sundance (yes, it will be 20 years next month), Soderbergh’s career has had its ups and downs, and major successes have often given way to two projects that were percieved as commercial failures (usually one made on an “art” budget and the other a big studio disappointment), which seemingly necessesitated a return to “safe” territory. Ocean’s 11 begat Full Frontal and Solaris, which Ocean’s 12, begat Bubble and The Good German. Ocean’s 13 was both awesome (for what it was) and awesomely successful. If Soderbergh could follow that up with a project as uncompromising as Che and have it not ultimately declared a financial debacle (even a $5 million total gross would make it a huge hit compared to the average gross of an IFC simultaneously released film), maybe going forward he’ll be on better footing to merge his experimental instincts with his Hollywood clout more seemlessly than before.