Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Resemblance

Recently I had the chance to see Benicio Del Toro's performance as Che Guevara in the film CHE, directed by Steven Soderbergh. It's quite a good movie and I can recommend it. Benicio Del Toro has become one of my favorite actors in the past ten years or so, and he did a wonderful job in this movie.

I know that it's the business of film producers to create imitations of reality. Or to create fantasies that seem real.

However, more than anything else, I was struck by his resemblance to the martyred revolutionary that he portrayed in the film. Nothing spells it out so well as photographs. Here are two:

Che Guevara

Del Toro as Guevra



at

2 comments:

  1. L. Roy Aiken12:57 PM

    I read Spain Rodriguez's comic book biography of Che in October. I loved it, and now I'm sold on the movie. I'd have preferred Guillermo DeToro to direct but this looks good.

    One thing that did surprise me about Spain's bio was it left out how Che might have been perfectly happy as a doctor with leftist leanings except that the CIA murdered his parents. The main argument against Che and his side was that they killed people (hey, you can't do THAT in war! that's just MEAN!) -- the main counterargument is the right-wing corporate conservative side enslaves people when they aren't killing them for fun. I can only hope that counterpoint gets hammered home in the film.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James Robert Smith6:10 PM

    Haven't read the Spain R. bio. I'll look it up. Yeah, they killed people. That's what happens in revolutions. Best quote from the movie for me: "This isn't a coup. It's a revolution."

    ReplyDelete