Monday 9 March 2009

Cuban scheduling crisis

Little more than a week after the film Che: Part Two (Guevara goes to Bolivia) was released and it's hardly showing in any London cinemas. You're more likely to find the more immediately commercial Part One (the fight for Cuba) showing at more convenient times.

Presumably the distributors decided to follow the model of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill duology and release the two parts of Steven Soderbergh's epic separately. It's a shame they weren't more ambitious as I'm sure there would have been an audience for event cinema of this kind – four hours is hardly that long, after all.

Hugely assured, Che is probably one of the films of the year – way better than anything nominated for 2009 Oscars – and a good deal more inspiring than such recent biopics as The Baader Meinhof Complex and Milk. A shame, too, that a map sequence seems to have been excised from the beginning of Che, though it is still credited at the end. 

2 comments:

  1. I thought the map thing was a bit lengthy... did you manage to see part 2? I saw part one in Spanish and enjoyed it despite not understanding anything.

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  2. Saw them both together and really enjoyed it, though Part Two is quite intense

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