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:

…Read more

• Jay and Mark Duplass are abandoning the mumblecore movement for Hollywood. And not only will they work with a bigger budget, they’ve also acquired an Apatow-appropriate cast featuring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei. The untitled comedy (formerly called Safety Man) will have us believe that Tomei actually birthed Hill and still looks as good as she does.
• Let the Mamma Mia! copycats come forward: New Line has bought the rights to the Off-Broadway musical Rock of Ages, which features a ton of 1980s rock anthems from bands like Journey, Twisted Sister, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, Styx and Mr. Big (see the full list of musical numbers here). Despite the title, though, there’s apparently no Def Leppard. Start growing your mullet now and we’ll see you on opening night for some heavy metal sing-a-long goodness.
• While Hollywood is abuzz with news of one female director being canned from a franchise, Fox 2000 has signed on another female director to take over a franchise. Of course, it’s only Betty Thomas and the movie she’s been hired for is Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel (yes, that’s the real title), so it’s still not that exciting a step for womankind.
• Brad Pitt will star in The Lost City of Z, a true story in which he’ll play Col. Percy Fawcett, an explorer who allegedly served as the inspiration for both Indiana Jones and Kent Allard (aka The Shadow). James Gray is directing.
• We still have to wait almost a year before seeing Benicio Del Toro as The Wolfman, since Universal pushed back the horror remake from April to November. Also, Ridley Scott’s Nottingham is delayed until 2010.

You can’t say that Steven Soderbergh’s Che isn’t beautifully shot and scored. You can’t say that Benicio Del Toro doesn’t give himself completely to the title role. You can’t say that it’s not an extremely daring piece of cinema –– in fact, it takes incredible balls to make a film this long, this wonky, while giving the audience this little to actually care about. In four-plus hours, across which Del Toro transforms from mild-mannered 20-something physician to dutiful soldier to full-on disciplinarian bad ass, then pops up in Bolivia after Intermission as a crazed, wheezing optimist who leads a doomed mission fueled purely by his unshakable faith that past glories are repeatable, Soderbergh manages to show an almost complete lack of concern for the inner life of his protagonist. If the traditional biopic is felled by forced emotional touchpoints that exaggerate or misrepresent their real-life equivalents, Che has the opposite problem: in producing a versimilar portrait of two temporally disconnected chunks of Che’s public life, Soderbergh has made a movie called Che that tells us nothing about Che, which largely relies on that lovely cinematography and dynamic score to fill in the emotional beats that the director hasn’t brought out of the material.

Soderbergh, who showed up to today’s post-NYFF screening press conference wearing a scruffy Che-reminiscent beard, admitted that he began working on the film (he and Del Toro started discussing the project in 2000) long before he managed to define his attraction to his subject. “Sometimes you say yes, and you’re not sure why you said yes,” the director said. “I went in with more of an idea of what I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do.”

“It wasn’t until the films were finished, right around Cannes, that I realized…it was about engagement versus disengagement. Every day in our lives, we’re making decisions. Do we want to participate, or do we want to observe? And I realized that what was compelling to me about Che was that when he decided to engage, he engaged fully.”

If only the same could be said of the filmmaker. …Read more

A bootleg, Spanish-language trailer for The Argentine, originally the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s Che, has leaked to YouTube. It’s not so hard to guess the bootleg’s vague derivation: The Argentine is set to be released in Spain on September 5, and this was clearly shot off a projection screen. It’s not totally crap quality, but with the soft-focus flicker and the language barrier, I don’t think I can form an opinion on the film based on this. But you should! Let us know what you think in the comments.

Interesting side note: on IMDB, Che has been split up into two entires, The Argentine and The Guerilla. If you search Che on that site, the former comes up, but the latter is not. This also probably has something to do with the fact that the two films are being released seperately in certain territories. What does this mean for Soderbergh’s reported insistence on releasing the full epic as a single film in the States? You tell me.

Legendary six-time-Oscar-winning make-up artist Rick Baker joined stars Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt to bring us the first footage of Universal’s new version of The Wolfman. And it’s a period piece.

Highlights:

- The origins of the remake stem from Del Toro’s Lon Chaney Jr. fandom.

- It looks like “Francis Ford Coppola’s The Wolfman”

- Of course, Anthony Hopkins would be more welcome as Van Helsing again

- At least it will likely be R-rated, as it looks quite bloody

- Baker honors Stan Winston by labeling his death “the end of an era”

- Blunt is apparently into two-headed dudes

Check out the full liveblog transcript after the jump.

…Read more

What’s going on with Steven Soderbergh’s Che? Heard anything recently? I haven’t seen any hard news published in any half-way reputable outlet since Cannes (aside from this report from IndianTelevision.com that Che will soon premiere on––wait for it––Indian television, but the film’s international release has never been in doubt). But that hasn’t put an end to the speculation.

On June 14, Jeff Wells did a post based on a conversation a friend of his had with some other guy who’s “familiar with the comings and goings of” Wild Bunch, the sales agency who funded Che and have been looking for a buyer for it since Berlin. The gist, as Wells passes it along through the various degrees of distance, is that Wild Bunch has given up trying to sell the current cut to a U.S. distributor, and Soderbergh’s too busy shooting his next movie to worry about refining his cut, and everyone’s just sort of shrugging their shoulders and cutting their losses.

I didn’t come across this story until today, when I finally decided to do some digging on a rumor I heard about the film last month when I was in Las Vegas. …Read more

I didn’t see Che. Last night was the first night since I’ve been here that I had an opportunity to go to bed at a reasonable hour and, after a week of dozing off in screenings on three hours of fitful sleep, I took it. Regrets? Reading the recaps and reviews, I have a few. I mean, if Anne Thompson is right, the Cannes cut will, like the Cannes cut of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, never again see the light of day. Comparing Che to that film and others which were brought to Cannes straight out of the oven and half-raw, she blogs:

…Read more

I’m watching the red carpet arrivals for the Che premiere right now via the Festivals closed circuit TV station. “Steven Soderbergh looks somewhat worried,” says the English translator. No shit. The director, wife Jules Asner and Che star Benicio Del Toro not only looked like they were walking into a hanging, but they couldn’t contain their apprehension when asked totally innocuous questions by the official red carpet interviewer. Examples:

Red Carpet Guy: “Steven, why did you want to make a movie about Che?”

Soderbergh: “I didn’t want to do it. They made me do it.”

Red Carpet Guy: “How did you become Che?”

Benicio Del Toro: “I don’t think I did it. But we tried.”

Soderbergh: [looking around] “It’ll be an interesting evening, one way or an other.”
Red Carpet Guy: “Are you nervous?”
Soderbergh: “Yeah!”