After making a series of ostensibly serious anti-war movies that bombed at the box office, Hollywood has finally found a wartime hero to embrace: Che Guevara, mass murderer.
Benicio Del Toro plays Guevara, and admits to emending certain inconvenient facets of his personality, before storming out of a Washington Times interview:
Critics of “Che” have suggested that the film whitewashes its protagonist’s legacy and that it’s impossible to understand the man by glorifying his more romantic aspects while ignoring his darker side.
“We can’t cover it all,” Mr. del Toro said. “You can make your own movie. You know? You can make your own movie. And let’s see. Do the research.”
What did Mr. Del Toro’s own research reveal?
“First, you start with what he wrote. What Che Guevara wrote. And he was a great writer, he wrote for years, so you start with that,” he said.
Given the film’s tenor, however – Guevara is shown telling a reporter that the most important thing for a revolutionary to have is “el amor,” love – it’s fair to ask to which parts of the Guevara bibliography the producer was exposed.
Because Che’s writings seem to destined for a more textured understanding outside Hollywood:
“He was a man full of hatred,” said Armando Valladares, the Cuban dissident imprisoned by the revolutionary regime in 1960. Named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Mr. Valladares is the author of “Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag” and a board member of the Human Rights Foundation. Speaking through Glenda Aldana, a translator who works for the foundation, Mr. Valladares points to Guevara’s writings as proof.
In his “Message to the Tricontinental,” Guevara espoused “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.”
“He took joy in killing counterrevolutionaries and was one of the most hard-edged, most Stalinist, pro-Soviet communists of the whole leadership,” said Ronald Radosh, a Hudson Institute adjunct fellow and author of “Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left”…
In the movie, Guevara is shown executing a man. But the man is executed for raping a child, not for being disloyal to the cause of revolution. Troops are offered a chance to desert, and get nothing more than a scolding for their cowardice…
“Che Guevara executed dozens and dozens of people who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty,” he said. “In his own words, he said the following: ‘At the smallest of doubt we must execute.’ And that’s what he did at the Sierra Maestra and the prison of Las Cabanas.”
I hope that Mr. Del Toro’s movie enjoys precisely the same box office success as have those which cast American military soldiers as deranged murderers, victims and miscreants.
In the meantime, everyone who wants to can “Seremos como el Che: Fiambres.”
I got about as much urge to spend money on this POS as I did for anything Oliver Stoned crapped out.
Absolutely agree with you: “the devil makes work for an unscrupulous mind”.
Yep, he was real brave when he was sending people to the wall. But when the Bolivian Army cornered him he tried to make deal. “I’m worth more alive than dead.” The troops on site didn’t agree.
Cold Cuts. Good bit of slang, that. Next is his BFF Fidel. Any day now.
Further proof that Hollyweird is getting more and more into navel-gazing and less into any shred of reality.
We saw Gran Torino this past weekend. It was an amazing film about a man’s redemption that comes with a terrible price. It’s a tour de force for Eastwood as director and actor. And it’s not nominated for any Oscars.
Further proof of the navel-gazing thing.
“He was a great writer, he wrote for years”.
Well shucks, back in the day, I knew a fellow who was a Pac Bell Yellow Pages marketing director. He had lots of people on his staff who literally wrote for years–turning out a new set of yellow pages for each region each year.
Moronic does not begin to describe the level of Del Toro’s argument.
[...] “He was a man full of hatred,” said Armando Valladares, the Cuban dissident imprisoned by the revolutionary regime in 1960. Named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Mr. Valladares is the author of “Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag” and a board member of the Human Rights Foundation. Speaking through Glenda Aldana, a translator who works for the foundation, Mr. Valladares points to Guevara’s writings as proof.” [...]
Although I seriously doubt Del Toro’s research was any deeper than skimming the abridged “Motorcycle Diaries”, I will agree that Guevara (he’s not my “friend”, ergo not “che”) was a decent writer with a very keen insight on a number of topics. His tract on guerilla warfare and ideology, in particular, is recommended reading, even if just for it’s applicability to current conflicts in the Middle East.
That said, we need to be careful who we canonize for the pop culture generation with revisionist (or at least small-scope) biopics. I know nada about this new movie, but I was rather disappointed by Motorcycle Diaries. Not because it was a bad film (actually, it was quite good), but because it was very deceptive in showing only that very first part of his life and making him a sympathetic figure. I’m sure most of the audience came out thinking he was another Albert Schweitzer (sp?). . .which is clearly 180 degrees from the reality of Guevara’s legacy.
The picture of Mr. Del Toro on Drudge, marching out of his news conference with a childish pout on his face represents to me what seems to be wrong with Hollywood these days. The actors and writers are moving further and further into an alternate universe from ours.
We watched two reruns of Frasier tonight on TV and had great pleasure laughing at a clever script with good repartee, and a brightness of tolerance about it. What has happened to that spirit we used to have? We really need it now, with the Democrats stripping our pockets and our children’s future nest-eggs. We need to pull together, friends, and cherish our families and our happy moments. And, as Churchill said in the dark days of the Nazi blitz, “never, never, never, never, never give up.”
Marianne
Oh, I think we could give up on Hollywood without a great loss to our lives.
There was a discussion some time ago about Steve McQueen. I purchased Le Mans for perhaps $5 at Amazon, played it the other night.
As God is my witness, My Good Wife asked if it has a plot. Honey, it has a Porsche 917 in it — who cares if it had a plot?
Later we watched Road House with Patrick Swaze. About the time something blew up I asked if it had a plot. She replied that it had Patrick Swaze in it, so didn’t need a plot.
I used to be confused, now I’m merely befuddled.
– Max
Humble1310/
The deeper one digs into things the more one realizes most things don’t “just” happen. I was on a site the other nite (should have bookmarked it) in which the argument was made that the lionization of “Che” was a carefully crafted and carried out campaign by the Soviet KGB with help of an Italian communist millionaire who printed up tens of thousands of those famouse “Che” T-Shirts and distributed/flooded them all over Europe and rest of world based on KGB art-work–all to compensate for his death and the growing unpopularity of the Cuban Revolucion. Not by accident my friend..Nothing by accident or natural evolution when the left is involved.
Max – I would specify that we could give up on “new” or “current” Hollyweird.
To me, Hollywood is represented by the likes of McQueen, Newman, Eastwood. Cary Grant. Katherine Hepburn. Bette Davis. Jimmy Stewart. Charlton Heston.
You’ll notice only one of those is still with us – Eastwood is about as fine a filmmaker/actor as we’ll ever see. We just don’t have the same integrity among our entertainers that we used to. Thank god Eastwood understands that and continues to produce incredible films with nuanced performances.
At the risk of repeating myself – go see Gran Torino. It’s a masterpiece.
Oh and Max – I’m with your wife about Road House. Plot? Really were there any other actors in that movie??? Oh yeah – Sam Elliott. A 2fer.
Given that even lefties generally friendly towards Che acknowledge that the movie is a 4.5 hour (!!) snooze-fest, it’s unlikely to do much at the box office. Because of the subject matter, it generates talk all out of proportion to its true impact, seeing that only a few hundred thousand people will actually pay money to see it.
I’m sure it will get long runs at the Cal-Berkeley, UT Austin, Harvard, and other campus movie houses, though.
To vergil Xenephon: Here here, sir! Good point.
Stand by for more of the same. Soon the cultural revolution of Mao will be glorified as “change you could count on”