After Che premiered at the New York Film Festival last week, Glenn Kenny wrote two blog posts in which he criticized anonymous critics for their criticism of Che’s lack of “human drama.” I knew I was implicated in the complaint –– In his first post, Kenny directly quoted a phrase I used in my write-up of the film but didn’t link to said write-up; in the second, he said he found it “exasperating” to see such a complaint from “people who position themselves as new voices, with new perspectives, in cinematic discourse” –– but I didn’t intend to respond. Not only do I stand by my take on the film and have little else to say beyond what I’ve already written, but when somebody criticizes something I write on the internet without linking, that’s basically equivalent to talking behind my back, and I’m usually content to pretend like I don’t know the talk is going on until I’m invited to defend myself.
But over the past few days, as reviews of the film far more considered than my own have started to stack up online, I’ve noticed something that I do think is worth commenting on. …Read more
Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.
He confirmed that in each market the film enters, it’ll screen for just one week, on one screen, with ticket buyers paying a premium (probably $25 each, including full-color printed program) for the experience. “I think that’s the ideal way to see it,” the director said, although he acknowledged that “it’s a lot to ask of an audience, to throw away an entire day.”
A source told me last night that IFC is banking that a lot of people are going to want to throw away their days on Che.
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
Disney still loves its cash calf, Miley Cyrus, and is doing all it can to see her mature in its own pastures. The studio has hired Nicholas Sparks for a tailor-made project along the lines of his A Walk to Remember. He’ll simultaneously pen the novel and script, the plot and title of which are unknown. The only thing certain about the film is that it won’t feature any singing parts for Cyrus.
More South Korea firsts: following the recent news that Universal is financing a South Korean film, Sony Pictures has announced a production that will be the first mainstream Hollywood movie to shoot in the country. Unfortunately, the movie is Beverly Hills Ninja 2, starring David Hasselhoff.
Michael Douglas will portray Liberace in a biopic written by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King) and directed by Steven Soderbergh, which is only slightly less bizarre than the news two years ago that Nicolas Cage was to produce and star in a Liberace film written by the partners in parody Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg (Disaster Movie). Soderbergh’s project will also involve his Ocean’s series producer, Jerry Weintraub, and Matt Damon, who will portray Liberace’s purported lover, Scott Thorson.
The second deal announced this week regarding a sci-fi version of The Fugitive: this one is titled Karma Coalition, and it’s different from the Tuesday-announced project, in that it involves the end of the world rather than time travel, and it’s written by the lead singer of an indie rock band (Shawn Christensen of stellastarr*).
The other night, someone with knowledge of these things approached me at a party and said, “Have you heard that Magnolia’s bought Che? I’ve never heard a more premature rumor in my life.” Any suspicion in my mind that this party chat was mere misdirection has just been proved unfounded with IFC’s announcement that they’ve bought Steven Soderbergh’s epic for U.S. release.
In not specifying that IFC will release the two halves of the film separately, the press release implies that Che’s “two stand-alone parts” will be shown in theaters back-to-back. But this is the only specific language regarding their distribution plan:
Che will be released for one week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December. The company will then re-open the film in January through IFC In Theaters, its day-and-date distribution platform which makes independent films available to a national audience in theaters and on-demand, simultaneously. It will also be included in the company’s exclusive video rental deal with Blockbuster Video.
I’ve pasted the full release after the jump. More when we get it.
UPDATE: Anne Thompson clarifies the “one movie, or two?” issue: “IFC will open the full four-hour movie with an intermission for one-week Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles before opening Che Part One (The Argentine) in 15 to 25 key markets in January; Part Two (The Guerilla) will follow the Oscar nominations announcement.”
With the first weekend of the 2008 Toronto International Fim Festival now in the dustbin of history, here are a few notes from the ground:
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler premiered here last night, fresh off its Golden Bear win in Venice, and nary a negative word has so far been heard. In the interest of time management, I’m going to wait until NYFF to catch it, but a reliable source told me after the screening that the film “is fucking awesome.” Apparently Fox Searchlight agrees––this morning they locked a deal to domestically distribute the film and finance a major Oscar push for star Mickey Rourke.
A film at the polar opposite end of the buzz spectrum is Spike Lee’s The Miracle at St. Anna, which even admirers of Spike’s provacations are calling a waste of time. Our own Kevin Kelly was at the film’s junket, which he says devolved into “The Elect Barack Obama Show” when neither journalists nor the filmmaker could keep the conversation focused on the movie. Kevin will have a report from the junket coming soon.
Somewhere in between in terms of audience reaction: Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. It’s my favorite film in Toronto this far, and a small contingent of journalists are also all about it. Still, some are (bafflingly, to my mind) pejoratively comparing it to Margot at the Wedding (the titles share a word, so apparently such comparisons are fair game), and rumor has it that the NYFF selection comittee unanimously rejected it for inclusion.
Magnolia hasn’t officially announced it yet, but everyone is saying that they’ve settled on a deal to distribute Che. The NY Post says Mark Cuban’s distribution arm is “already booking theaters.”
The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival begins today, and Kevin Kelly and I will be there for the next ten days reporting back. What follows is not exactly an iron-clad preview of our Toronto coverage––in addition to some of the films below, I’m definitely planning to see new works by Claire Denis, Agnes Varda, Jonathan Demme and Richard Linklater, and would of course recommend that anyone on the ground see some of my favorites from past festivals, including Medicine for Melancholy and A Christmas Tale. This is more of a list of predictions of what everyone else is going to be talking about, while I’m pushing my glasses up my nose and rushing to to the next screening of the a South Korean movie about drunken lonliness. Enjoy! If you have your own predictions for what will catch fire in Ontario, let us know in the comments.
Obviously, anything with “porno” in the title has a certain automatic contingent (hello, Google searchers! Sorry to disappoint!) But then, so does anything with the credit “written and directed by Kevin Smith.” And then there’s the leading man. Some perspective: Smith’s last three films have grossed an average of $26 million each; the last three films starring Seth Rogen have grossed an average of $117 million each. With Jay and Silent Bob finally retired (we think/hope), and Rogen in tow for the usual, MPAA-baiting Smithism, Porno could––however ironically––become what Jersey Girl was supposed to be: the tipping point that expands the Smith fan base beyond the longtime Clerks faithful.
Crowdpleasers make me itch. But then, to borrow a line from David Fincher, I’m an asshole. Assuming you are not, you might be interested to know that Slumdog Millionaire shows all the symptoms of becoming The Next Juno. Like Juno, Slumdog premiered in a TBA slot at Telluride, where reaction from all but our own Kevin Buist was enthusiastic, evenhyperbolically so. Also ike Juno, it’s a music-fueled piece of pop art in which young love results from unlikely circumstances. And, thanks to Warner Brothers’ loss of faith in this tier of the distribution market, it’s now being distributed by Fox Searchlight––just like Juno. If looking for The Next Juno is now part of our jobs, at least Searchlight is taking all the arduous work out of it.
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.
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:
I’m watching the red carpet arrivals for the Chepremiere 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!”
It’s Che day. Steven Soderbergh’s Guevara epic has its world premiere this evening at 6:30, and as of this 9am writing, ticket-less gawkers are already lining up outside the Palais, some with Cuban cigars, all with signs declaring their need for tickets. From a press and industry perspective, people are definitely talking about the film, but everyone seems less interested in what’s going to be on screen tonight than in how it’ll eventually be seen.
Che is screening here for the press and the public as a single, four-hour film, but it’s playing in the market for buyers as two separate pieces, The Argentine and Guerilla. This leaves open a number of possibilities: a) the film(s) could be released franchise style, ala Kill Bill; b) the two films could be picked up by different distributors (unlikely, but not impossible); and c) one half of Che could be seen theatrically whilst the other does not. Rumor has it that the second half of the story is currently in better shape than the first; it remains to be seen what would be lost if half of Che was demoted to straight-to-DVD.
It may seem a bit early to write 1700+ words on the greatness of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara epic, especially without having actually seen the films (titled The Argentineand Guerrilla), but that couldn’t stop Jeff Wells from contributing such a piece to The Huffington Post yesterday. At least the guy has read the screenplays, both penned by Peter Buchman, but otherwise it’s all a lot of confident speculation and hopeful anticipation, particularly for Benicio Del Toro’s performance, which Wells is sure will be garner Oscar talk (didn’t the casting alone garner such talk two years back?):
With Benicio del Toro, the moody and mesmerizing Marlon Brando-ish actor whose work keeps getting deeper and more fascinating, all but certain to stir Oscar talk for his performance as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the legendary Argentine/Cuban firebrand. Even if the Che movies turn out to be problematic, Del Toro can’t not whip ass. He’s too strange, too gifted. Guevara is too perfect a role for him. All the stars and planets are aligned.
Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.
It may seem a bit early to write 1700+ words on the greatness of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che Guevara epic, especially without having actually seen the films (titled 
