That reminds me

All this revolution talk reminded me of a movie that looks really good. It's called The Motorcycle Diaries and is about Che Guevara's road trip through South America. It was, apparently, a life-changing experience. The film doesn't seem to bother directly with the worldview he would form later in life, though the trip marked the beginning of his Marxist leanings. I'm sick to death of politics; if this is a manifesto piece, rivers will run red with my fury.

That pouty-mouthed succubus you loved the hell out of in Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien, Gael Garcia Bernal, is Che. No one really saw The Crime of Padre Amaro, which is good because it sucked, but he's pretty fantastic in all of those movies.

The trailer I saw starts out with a few quotes, which are wildly divergent and hilarious. Jean-Paul Sartre called him, "the most complete human being of our age." Sartre had a tendency to exaggerate, so I'm going to assume he's not really that great. I wonder, though, is Sartre praising Guevara or deriding everyone else? I'm not sure.

The American Spectator was less ambiguous: "Che is a cultural icon because of his ability to provoke empathy among the spoiled youth of the affluent west."

It's funny, that is exactly how I think of the guy. My first glimpse of Che was that famous picture, Warholized onto a two-tone red and black bumper sticker, on the back of some hemp-festooned kid's twinkling yellow Range Rover. There were also the thousands of shirts and posters all over campus, each with the exact same likeness. Needless to say, his place as the commander-in-chief and defacto messiah of the Trustafarian army has earned him a place of scorn in my heart.

So, at the very worst, this movie will make me rethink my preconceptions of the man himself and his motivations.

At best, though, I see this being the road movie buddy flick I've been pining for since I saw Easy Rider. I tend to get too excited about these kinds of movies. I'm obviously setting myself up for disappointment.

Example: Maria Full of Grace--that was a really hackneyed segue because MFoG has none of the elements that make up a "road movie buddy flick"--I'm just struggling for synergy.

Regardless, I saw it last night and it let me down, but only because I desperately wanted it to be the best movie ever. It's fair to say I was disappointed because it wasn't the movie I imagined it was going to be. Maybe I'm being unfair. Lots of critics are saying that it documents with grim precision and attention to detail the job of the drug mule. It does. And that's exactly my problem with it.

It's entirely too much a documentary, despite being fiction. The camera is too unsympathetic; the screenplay doesn't know what it's trying to say. I hate films that preach too much, that donkey punch you with their message. You leave the theatre feeling cheap and violated, like the filmmakers didn't trust you to extract their urgent message from the subtleties of narrative voice and characterization. So they beat you with it. That bugs me. I have thousands of inferiority complexes and I don't like being talked down to, especially when I'm paying 9 dollars for the honor.

Last night, though, I would have welcomed some abuse. There's a line that demarcates arrogant proselytizing from the complete objectivity that makes a movie pointless. It's a big line. Most movies fall on this line. There is really no excuse for not being on this line. You can land on this line even with standoffish camera work and ambivalent narration, as long as there is emotion in the script. MFoG lacks that big time. Maria never even really fights for herself, how can Joshua Marsten expect us to want to fight for her? This is all the more frustrating because I can see the film Marsten was trying to make, and that film--I think--I would have really enjoyed.

I said before it was too much a documentary, but it's not even that. The characters are so insipid and bewildered by their plight that no one would mistake this for a film documenting real people.

There is little life here, just action.

What life I saw on screen is the direct result of some vitally brilliant acting by Catalina Sandino Moreno. She was almost enough to pull the hulking mass of Marsten's script onto that big ass line--maybe she did, I'll have to think about that. I can't wait for her to get a script that more fully showcases her excruciating amount of talent.

crap . . . it looks like I'm in the 1% of people who didn't think this movie was the second coming. I bet every one of those reviewers has a Che Guevara hoodie somewhere in their closet . . . Only one other guy, Stephen Witty, had more criticism than praise. This is annoying because I don't think I really like his other opinions. Oh well.