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Benicio Del Toro leads the charge for ‘Che’

Benicio Del Toro has made a career of playing men on society’s outskirts. Now as the revolutionary ‘Che,’ he shows his power.
By Mark Olsen
December 11, 2008

In films as varied as “The Usual Suspects,” “Basquiat,” “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas,” “Traffic” and “Things We Lost in The Fire,” Benicio Del Toro seems drawn to play the eccentric outsider.

Now in director Steven Soderbergh’s “Che” — which opens for a one-week run on Friday in Los Angeles and New York — Del Toro plays 1950s and ’60s revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Following Guevara from Mexico to Cuba to New York to Bolivia, the film — which will screen as a single 4-hour unit during its short run, and be broken into two separate films for the wider release in January — has a broad sweep, but also an eye for the specific, becoming perhaps the ultimate expression of Del Toro’s physical, enigmatic screen presence.

The project began with the 41-year-old Del Toro, who took an interest in Guevara’s book “The Bolivian Diary” and pursued the idea with producer Laura Bickford. This was just before his turn in the 2000 film “Traffic” (Bickford produced and Soderbergh directed), which earned Del Toro an Academy Award for supporting actor.

Del Toro’s work in “Che” appears to be a rare and a truly fortuitous match of actor and role.

“It certainly seemed that way to me immediately,” said Soderbergh of the way in which Del Toro suited the part. “I had the same sensation I had when I was working with Julia Roberts on ‘Erin Brockovich,’ the right person in the right role at the right time.”

Despite the film’s controversial reception following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival — Variety called it “defiantly nondramatic” and “a commercial impossibility” — Del Toro, who also has a producing credit on the film, was awarded the best actor prize. Sean Penn, who led the festival jury, later called Del Toro’s work “one of the first tour de force performances in film history that doesn’t rely on the close-up.”

Keeping it true

Del Toro’s tall, broad frame is frequently shot by Soderbergh in a full-body shot, so that the actor works with his shoulders and hips as much as his eyes, while allowing other actors equal visual weight within the frame.

“When Che wrote he was very honest; that’s one of the first things that really moved me,” said Del Toro. “My first attraction toward Che was a book of letters he wrote to his family. There was an honesty in that, where he could be very self-critical, but also with a witty nod.

“The approach of the movie is to be true, factually true from what we gathered, but also true to him.”

Del Toro believes the film will have a life beyond whatever it may (or may not) make at the box office during its initial theatrical releases. It recently played to cheers in Havana and protests in Miami.

“One day, the movie will pop up and they’ll shake hands with it,” he says. “I remember the first time I heard [ Miles Davis' landmark 1970 album] ‘Bitches Brew,’ I was like, ‘I can’t listen to that’. And then one time I was driving and one of the songs came on and everything changed. This movie, at some point it will change someone’s mind, what they thought it was.”

Transforming man

Before shooting the final sections of the film that portray Guevara’s time in Bolivia at the end of his life, Del Toro dropped some 35 pounds. For Guevara’s arrival in Bolivia in disguise, he shaved the top of his head rather than wear a bald cap. For his role in “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” as the fictional sidekick Dr. Gonzo (based on writer Hunter S. Thompson’s friend and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta), Del Toro put on 40 pounds.

It seems only fitting that following the release of “Che” he will next be seen in a new version of ” The Wolf Man,” perhaps the ultimate story of personal transformation.

“I wish I could stay home,” he said of what draws him again and again to roles that require severe physical transformation and deep emotional commitment.

“I wish I could be asleep right now. But why do I do it? That’s the way the cookie crumbles for me, I’m that kind of actor. Do I invite it? Maybe. At the same time it invites me.

“It’s just who I am.”

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sean Penn and “Milk,” Gus Van Sant’s biopic about gay rights leader Harvey Milk, continued to gain awards momentum Wednesday, winning best film from the New York Film Critics Circle.

Penn was chosen as best actor for his performance in the lauded film about Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician who was assassinated in 1978.

Josh Brolin won best supporting actor for his performance in the film. On Tuesday, Penn was chosen as best actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

“Milk” also leads the Broadcast Film Critics Association with eight nominations, tied for the most with “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

Like their West Coast brethren, the New York critics picked Sally Hawkins for best actress for her performance in Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky.”

Best director went to Leigh.

The New York circle, which last year chose “No Country for Old Men” as best film, is a group of 33 New York-based critics.

Their picks are one of the early film honors in Hollywood’s long awards season, which continues Thursday with nominations for the Golden Globes.

Best supporting actress went to Penelope Cruz for her role in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.”

Jenny Lumet, daughter of Sidney Lumet, won for her screenplay of “Rachel Getting Married.”

“Man on Wire” won best documentary, “WALL-E” won best animated film and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” won best foreign film.

Anthony Dod Mantle won for his cinematography in “Slumdog Millionaire.” Courtney Hunt (“Frozen River”) won for best first film. The awards ceremony will be held Jan. 5 in New York.

W: A crude approach is not good for grasping much of anything
By David Walsh

W. is veteran American director Oliver Stone’s film about the life and career of President George W. Bush. It was shot and edited rapidly for release while Bush was still in office. The November 4 election was no doubt a consideration as well.

The film is a collection of episodes, broadly written and performed, following Bush from his student days at Yale to the disastrous turn that the Iraq war took for the US in 2003-2004. W. contains two time frames—the first treats Bush’s earlier life impressionistically, offering glimpses of him over the course of several decades; the second, dealing with his first years in the White House, dwells at greater length on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

The pivot of the film occurs in 1986, around the time of his 40th birthday, when Bush “sees the light” and becomes a reborn Christian. The film takes seriously the notion that he conquered his inner demons and made something of himself.

A theme throughout is Bush’s conflict and rivalry with his father, George H. W. Bush, congressman, CIA director, vice president and, ultimately, president from 1989 to 1993. We first see the youthful Bush (Josh Brolin), 20 or so, when he’s being hazed at a Yale University fraternity house. Later, Bush phones his father (James Cromwell)—now a congressman—from jail, and receives a warning that this had better be the last such incident.

Intercut with that material are scenes of the Bush White House, and in particular, the debate over a prospective war with Iraq following the events of September 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris) are the most ardent advocates of an invasion, countering the skepticism and reluctance of Secretary of State Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright).

The young Bush carries on, from one escapade to another, eventually meeting his future wife, Laura (Elizabeth Banks), in 1977. Defeated in a run for Congress by a populist Democrat, Bush promises “never to be out-Texased again.” In 1986, he moves to Washington, and experiences his conversion. A huckster evangelist, Earle Hudd (Stacy Keach), presides over Bush’s change of heart.

Switching once again to the more recent past, Stone’s film presents Cheney delivering a lecture on Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves, pointing to the region and the Straits of Hormuz in particular as the “chokepoint of civilization.”

The film cuts back in time again, and we see Bush senior presiding over the Gulf War in 1991, making the decision, with which his son disagrees, not to march on Baghdad. George W. announces his plan to run for governor of Texas in 1994, much to his family’s consternation.

In 1999, he tells his preacher-advisor, “God wants me to run for president.” We jump to 2003 and the fraudulent claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Hussein regime’s efforts to get hold of “yellow cake” uranium ore from Niger. Finally, the invasion occurs and Bush announces “mission accomplished” in May. The fiasco then unfolds.

Oliver Stone has never been a subtle director. He perceives himself, it seems, as someone who strives to treat a given subject in broad strokes. Stone told an interviewer from GQ magazine that, like George W. Bush, he has the tendency not to want “to pay too much attention to details.”

The director possesses a lively vulgarity, which he applies to glaringly public and intimate moments alike. Occasionally, this is effective and attractive; here, more often than not, however, it is not.

The references to Bush’s fascination with baseball and his aspiration to become the professional sport’s commissioner seem about right. He and the world might have been happier. A final scene, in which now-President Bush is unable to answer a simple question from a reporter, as to whether he had made any mistakes or done any soul-searching, is telling. These moments are exceptions.

Malice doesn’t seem the clue to the problems in W. so much as great confusion, and ignorance of American social realities.

It is a fallacy to imagine that a crude approach can adequately grasp a crude subject. In general, a crude approach is not good for grasping much of anything. Because Bush is an extremely limited human being doesn’t mean that his life and advancement are not bound up with complex questions, or even that his own psychology is an open book. Stone, unhappily, seems most at home with moments of drunkenness, backwardness, unconsciousness. He revels in and savors them.

Stone’s and screenwriter Stanley Weiser’s Bush is an eternal frat boy, living in the shadow of his father. He’s essentially well-intentioned, if unevolved, amiable, but prone to angry outbursts, impulsive. Brolin does an effective impersonation of the public Bush, but it’s not clear that we are much further in the direction of understanding the man who would become America’s 43rd president.

The film catches largely at externals, in its look, feel and social perceptions. As always, a good deal of effort has gone into making certain that hairdos, clothes, automobiles and furniture correspond to the respective eras.

To explain Bush’s trajectory, as W. does, largely on the basis of his unresolved conflict with his father begs the question. Many people have such battles, many, alas, also “find Jesus” at present, many leave off drinking—very, very few are elevated to the White House.

It’s true that W. makes obligatory reference to other questions: the pursuit of Iraq’s oil reserves, for example. In relation, however, to the significance of that issue and its consequences—1 million or more Iraqis killed, thousands of Americans dead and wounded, a country ruined, a region driven to the brink of a wider war—the scene is relatively perfunctory and formulaic. Cheney is filmed from a distance, and the moment is not likely to linger in the memory.

This isn’t what Stone feels most deeply or what interests him, in the end. What’s placed in the foreground, in almost perpetual, warts-and-all close-up, are Bush the younger’s relations with his father and family. The sequences in the White House, the discussions of war and torture, are fairly flat and unevocative. The film gets its adrenaline pumping almost exclusively during the intra-family squabbles.

Neither element is entirely convincing, because a deeper grasp of the relation between Bush’s personality, his family and the larger world of American politics social life eludes the director and screenwriter.

Stone framed his film to an interviewer from the Guardian in the following manner: “How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” He continued: “He had tremendous personal problems, and I have to give him enormous credit—he did overcome them, through willpower. Whether he solved them is another issue, but he overcame certain states of mind.”

This, to put it politely, is inadequate. To put its shallowness in context, one must consider Stone’s background.

Born to privilege in a staunchly Republican family, and a fellow student of Bush’s at Yale in the 1960s, Stone enlisted in the military and volunteered for combat in Vietnam. The experience shattered and changed him. To his credit, he translated that into two films hostile to US imperialism’s intervention in Southeast Asia, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

Vietnam and related events knocked Goldwater Republicanism out of Stone and propelled him toward the “counter-culture” and various strands of protest and liberalism, and hedonism, but it did not equip him with a coherent and profound understanding of American class society. This is not entirely his fault. The intellectual laziness and evasiveness of the New Left and the anti-war protest movement could not have provided such an insight, nor did they have any desire to.

Stone is something of a lost soul, alienated from his social and ideological roots, but never finding his way to a more substantial and politically informed opposition to American capitalism. He is congenitally all over the place; indeed, one might say, that is his life’s vocation.

His comments about W. wander here and there, and few of them indicate any grasp of the questions involved in the effort to bring Bush’s life accurately and meaningfully to the screen.

“It’s not a political film,” Stone told Maxim magazine, “but a Shakespearean one. It’s a film about George W. rebelling against his father, doing better than his father, believing that he’s stronger than his father, and outdoing his father…and it’s about the colossal mistakes he made and the lies he told. In a way it’s Oedipal. One can say he did kill the father because he did destroy the legacy, the name. It’s a big thing with the Bushes.”

In passing, the same interviewer can note that Stone “has little sympathy for Bush, who he says is responsible for tens of thousands of needless deaths abroad and the corrosion of civil liberties at home and the fortune of future generations squandered.” The director, however, tells the interviewer from GQ that the film is “light,” prompting the question, “Wait, are you saying this movie is a comedy?,” to which Stone replies: “Well, it has to be done with an ebullience and a certain fun, because the guy is goofy. He’s a goofball!”

The inconsistency and unseriousness are not Stone’s alone, they are shared by a wide layer of pragmatic middle class iconoclasts and critics in the US, who lament this or that feature of American life, even warn histrionically about incipient “fascism,” and then go about their daily business complacent as clams.

That George W. Bush is an empty vessel would not be disputed by many thinking people. But how, the filmmakers might have asked themselves, is it possible that American capitalism placed its fortunes in the hands of such a lowlife?

No serious reference is made to the ultra-right forces that pushed Bush forward, the same forces responsible for the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment drive. Stone, in a peculiar manner, takes the Bush “success story” at face value. No doubt Bush junior had his conscious or semiconscious motives, but what driving forces, as Marxists know to ask, stood behind those motives and by what social elements was he picked up?

A more plausible explanation than the time-worn Oedipal story is that Bush was merely a front man for more conscious and politically motivated forces, with a wide-ranging and reactionary agenda at home and abroad. Painted as amiable and down-to-earth by the media, partial to vague “values,” supposedly conservative but “compassionate,” with a well-known family name, Bush was directed toward the White House; he had relatively little to do with the matter. No doubt, if he had not stopped drinking and carousing, the opportunity would have been closed to him, but that is about the most one can say of his “overcoming” his “personal problems.”

The deterioration in the political representatives of the ruling elite is a function, in the final analysis, of the decline in its fortunes and prospects. George W. Bush’s ascension to prominence speaks to the terminal crisis of American capitalism. Now a cosmetic change may be necessary, but Bush was no accident: he represented accurately the dominant section of the US establishment—arrogant, shortsighted and criminal to the core.

Some of those same forces, chastened by the experience, are now endorsing Sen. Barack Obama in an effort to compensate for their sin.

Stone and Weiser sacrifice art and truth to narrow political concerns. Scandalously, they make no mention of Bush’s presiding over 153 executions as governor of Texas, in one case mocking a woman’s pleas for mercy. The deep sadism of the man is missing. Nor is the hijacking of the 2000 election treated. In both cases, no doubt scenarist and director sought to avoid “partisan” and “controversial” issues, which would have brought the right-wing media down on their heads. As a result of Stone’s ideological blindness or, not to mince words, political cowardice, the full picture of the man and his period is not here.

Along the same lines, Stone portrays Bush the elder as a stern and honorable figure, when, in fact, he was (and is) a corrupt, greedy representative of the ruling elite, and as CIA director, up to his elbows in blood. The filmmakers also, in passing, canonize Colin Powell as a voice of moderation, entirely undeservedly. The chief diplomatic liar for the Bush administration and a war criminal in his own right, Powell developed public differences only after he saw that the Iraq war was going badly.

All in all, Stone and Weiser have no historical or sociological purchase on Bush. Such an understanding wouldn’t preclude individual psychology; on the contrary, it would create the context in which those private relations would take on real, full-bodied life. That opportunity was not taken.

NY Film Festival Website

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villagevoice.com

New York Film Festival 2008
By J. Hoberman

What’s the story with the 2008 New York Film Festival? I’ll cop to being co-conspirator. I helped pick the films, as did my colleague Scott Foundas. For better or worse, two of the festival’s five-member selection committee work for Village Voice Media. (For the record, the other three are Richard Peña—marking his 20th year as NYFF program director—Kent Jones, also of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and critic Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly.)

Anybody who has ever done this sort of thing will tell you that a festival can only be as good as what’s out there and, this year, there was plenty of action. Cannes, as usual, was the prospector’s mother lode.

Sixteen NYFF features premiered on La Croisette, including a number of winners: Laurent Cantet’s opening night The Class (Palme d’Or), Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (Grand Prix), Steven Soderbergh’s Che (Best Actor for Benicio Del Toro), Steve McQueen’s Hunger (Caméra d’Or for best first film), and Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan (Prix Un Certain Regard).

Other festival winners include Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, for which actress Sally Hawkins was awarded a Silver Bear at Berlin, and Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and—speaking as someone who found Aronofsky’s previous film, The Fountain, ludicrous—my admiration as well.

The NYFF has an understandable interest in showcasing the highlights of the big three international festivals but, to my mind, a greater mission in showcasing those movies yet to land U.S. distribution—and this year, there are many.

Both Che and The Wrestler have been acquired since the NYFF slate was announced, but the remaining orphans include such notable auteur films as 24 City, the latest docu-fictional conundrum (showing but once) by China’s vanguard indie Jia Zhangke, and the dark comedy Four Nights With Anna, a terrific comeback by the onetime prince of the Polish new wave, Jerzy Skolimowski.

The Headless Woman, the third feature by Lucrecia Martel, leading director of the Argentine renaissance, is her strongest to date—at the very least, this brilliantly edited, purposefully disorienting comedy about a middle-aged woman’s post-car-accident confusion is the movie I’m most looking forward to revisiting.

Among the other undistributed films, this cinephile would like to direct your attention to the following: For the first time in its history, the NYFF has not one but two—and two very different—movies from Kazakhstan. Chouga, directed with characteristic precision by Central Asia’s leading Bressonian, Darezhan Omirbaev, is an austere and affecting adaptation of Anna Karenina (showing only once, for you cognoscenti); Tulpan, a first feature by the poetic ethno-documentarian Dvortsevoy, is a spectacular, unclassifiable immersion in the daily life of nomad sheepherders working the awesome emptiness of the Kazakh steppe.

Nearly as exotic and no less predictable, Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero is a portrait of the Pinochet dictatorship, taking one nut’s obsession with Saturday Night Fever for its ruling metaphor. Another eccentric political thriller by a director without local name recognition, Catalan filmmaker Jaime Rosales’s Bullet in the Head is the NYFF’s main section’s most experimental movie (think last year’s In the City of Sylvia—but different). It’s showing only once in the capacious Ziegfeld—and is highly unlikely to ever receive such a magnificent projection again.

On the other hand, Afterschool, a strong first feature by 25-year-old Antonio Campos unaccountably overlooked by Sundance, seems destined for distribution—the backstory is intriguing (more on that in next week’s issue), as is the movie’s exposé of privileged preppies whose truth is in the iPhone of the beholder. I have a hunch that the festival’s Mexican equivalent, Gerardo Naranjo’s self-consciously neo–new wave and triumphantly tragicomic I’m Gonna Explode, involving two dissolute high-school students on the road to nowhere, will also attract some discerning distributor. I didn’t much care for Naranjo’s previous Drama/Mex, but for my money, I’m Gonna Explode is this year’s sleeper. Let the games begin!

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amny.com

New York Film Festival’s 12 best bets

By Mina Hochberg | amNewYork movie critic

Last year’s New York Film Festival gave us ‘No Country For Old Men’ and ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.’ This year, the festival, now in its 46th year, offers a crop of equally enticing and sobering movies. On the slate are 28 films from 18 countries, helmed by veteran and first-time directors.

Headquartered at Lincoln Center, the festival is usually an Upper West Side affair. But due to construction, most films will be playing at the venerable (and gigantic) Ziegfeld Theatre on 54th Street and Sixth Avenue. Here are a dozen picks you may want to check out.

The Wrestler
Darren Aronofsky’s last film, ‘The Fountain,’ was a box-office bomb, but it sounds like redemption is on the horizon. ‘The Wrestler’ has been reaping all sorts of praise on the festival circuit. Much of the talk has been directed at Mickey Rourke, who stars as a pro wrestler forced to work at a deli counter after suffering a heart attack. There¹s even talk of Oscar nominations, which would be a first for Rourke.

Changeling
Clint Eastwood directs and Angelina Jolie stars in this film about a mother whose son disappears from her Los Angeles home one day. A manhunt ensues until, a few months later, the police find her child and send him home. Except for one thing: The kid’s not her son. Oops. It’s based on a true story, which makes it all the more compelling.

Che
Steven Soderbergh’s biopic of Che Guevara traces the revolutionary leader’s military career from the Cuban Revolution to his final chapter in Bolivia.

Benicio Del Toro won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Che. Warning: You may want to skip this one if you’ve got a short attention span. The running time is four hours, plus a 30-minute intermission.

The Class
Winner of the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Laurent Cantet’s ‘The Class’ adapts a teacher’s autobiography about working at an inner-city school in Paris. The book’s author, François Bégaudeau, plays himself in the film, and the kids are played by non-professional actors. If you’ve been craving a good inspirational-teacher movie, this is it.

Wendy and Lucy
Wendy ( Michelle Williams) sets out from Oregon to Alaska in the hopes of finding a job at a fish cannery. With her dog, Lucy, at her side, Wendy quickly runs into hardships and relies on the generosity of strangers to get by — that is, when strangers are willing to be generous. Kelly Reichardt directs with her trademark nuance and minimalism.

Hunger
In his first film, director Steve McQueen (no, not the dead actor) reenacts the hunger strike waged by IRA member Bobby Sands in 1981. Sands’ mission? Improving conditions for political prisoners like himself. McQueen is a prize-winning visual artist, so you can expect some exceptional imagery.

Ashes of Time Redux
Wong Kar Wai has given his 1994 martial arts film, ‘Ashes of Time,’ a makeover with new music, new edits and a longer running time. He has also restored the color. The story centers on a bitter man who exiles imself after his one true love rejects him. From his lonely desert outpost, he contracts out assassinations. Luckily for him, there’s hope for his broken heart.

A Christmas Tale
Holiday movies usually come out around Thanksgiving, but here’s a teaser to get you in the mood. Catherine Deneuve stars in this French comedy about a Christmas family reunion. She plays the matriarch of your typical dysfunctional brood: There’s the black sheep and his Jewish girlfriend, a sensitive son and the level-headed dad.

Gomorrah
Based on Roberto Saviano¹s bestselling book, ‘Gomarrah’ is an epic movie about the Camorra crime family, which dominates the area around Naples. Italian director Matteo Garrone weaves five stories together, each demonstrating how deeply the Camorras are entrenched in Neapolitan life. This one made a big splash at Cannes.

Let It Rain
Agnes Jaoui explores family issues and class conflict in her third film, ‘Let It Rain.’ When a feminist author decides to run for political office, she pays a visit to her hometown, where she plans to announce her candidacy.

While there, the son of her family’s housekeeper tries to jumpstart his film career by shooting her for a documentary about successful women. What will prevail — his ineptitude or his efforts?

Summer Hours
Three siblings living all over the world: Paris, New York and Shanghai — are brought together when their mother passes away, leaving them with a large estate and a collection of precious art from a renowned uncle. As they debate whether to put the art in a museum, the siblings come to grips with being motherless and revisiting the country they once called home. It is directed by Olivier Assayas.

Bullet in the Head
No festival would be complete without a voyeur movie. In ‘Bullet in the Head,’ the audience gets to watch a Spanish man of middle age as he goes about his normal life — listening to music, talking on the phone, going to parties, having sex. Director Jaime Rosales withholds details about our mystery man, letting viewers piece his story together.

Che

Hunger


The Class

Changeling

Happy-Go-Lucky

nydailynews.com

Soderbergh’s epic ‘Che’ lands US distributor

TORONTO — Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara film biography “Che” has found a U.S. distributor that will release it in theaters this December to qualify for the Academy Awards.

IFC Films announced Wednesday it acquired domestic rights to the two-part, 4½-hour saga, which stars Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro as the Argentine doctor who became one of the heroes of Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution.

The film will play a one-week qualifying run in Los Angeles and New York in December for Oscar consideration.

It will reopen in theaters in January and be available to cable and satellite subscribers through IFC’s movies-on-demand service.

“Che” earned Del Toro the best-actor prize in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered.

The acquisition was announced at the Toronto International Film Festival, where “Che” also screened.

“‘Che’ is nothing less than the film event of the year,” said Jonathan Sehring, IFC Films president.

“By giving us the rise and fall of one of the great icons of history, Steven Soderbergh and Benicio Del Toro, who gives an incredible soulful performance, have humanized him and given audiences around the world something that will be discussed for years to come.”

nypress.com

FAR FROM FUTILE
Cusack and Co. keep this satirical war film earnest rather than cynical

By Armond White

“Smart” has become a bad word. It’s next to ìhotî as the appellation most easily given to what’s shallow—yet obvious—in our culture. War, Inc. starts with an ominously “smart” prologue: “In the 21st century, great corporations will bestride the earth, replacing nations as the true creators of history, amassing powerful private armies to do their bidding. But in delicate situations they need matters adjudicated on a single day a solitary man.” This is Michael Moore–level smartness, but director Joshua Seftel and co-screenwriters Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser and John Cusack go farther than sarcasm.

Better than smart, War, Inc. has heart. Cusack’s performance as Hauser, a globe-spanning hitman ordered to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil magnate in the fictitious oligarchy Turaqistan, displays a sardonic weariness that cuts through the cynicism of the film’s Borat/Children of Men/Syriana dystopia. Hauser’s bemused demeanor—his caring humor—saves the movie, but it is also a sign of his humanity. Because he’s been spiritually wounded, he kills. And he kills in order to push back at the world that betrays everything he used to believe in. Few political satires are motivated by such quality of feeling.

Consider the plot: An intrepid globetrotter enters foreign territory where he must combat rapacious conspirators. He discovers a new sense of personal and national obligation, gathers a fatherless child into his care, falls in love and winds up reconstituting his broken nuclear family. That synopsis describes War, Inc. as well as Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull. These films complement each other; one reflects the deeper meanings of an action extravaganza, the other clarifies the ideas and feelings inside an arcane, complicated satire.

Watching War, Inc. brought back the Crystal Skull image of Indiana Jones witnessing a nuclear mushroom cloud—a sign of the terrifying immensity of modern knowledge that crushes human will. Indy’s attempt to reconcile dread experience with ongoing life parallels Hauser’s adventure. Both films are comedies, but they are politically earnest. Neither offers the typically “smart” cynical approach to political awareness.

Cusack and Co. don’t settle for congratulating today’s fashionable sense of futility (recently cited by Frank Rich as, “80-plus percent of Americans believ[ing] their country is in a ditch”). Instead, they show us why. Hauser’s Indy-like sense of kick-ass survival (that is, hope) is pro-active in the face of corporate-sponsored madness. Logos suffuse this war-torn milieu, recalling what the The B-52s’ new album calls “misery in the funplex”) yet the hyper-awareness of consumerism isn’t dismissive like Mike Judge’s overly ironic Idiocracy.

Hauser’s a cynic whose encounters with crusading journalist Natalie (Marisa Tomei) and debased pop star Yonica Babyeah (Hilary Duff) revive buried emotions. Some of the best acting on screen this year happens between these three stars. Cusack with Tomei’s swift temperaments usually outpace the movies they’re in; but here—with equals—they achieve the excitingly contentious political rapport of righteous bedfellows. (She says, “It’s hard not to feel I’m always on the losing side.” He answers, “You are.”) And Duff finally finds a role perfect for her Dolly Parton–prodigy face: a teen star poignantly experienced beyond her years.

This trio belongs to red and blue state America as much as to some surreal apocalyptic elsewhere, and that makes War, Inc. more than smart; it’s useful. Director Seftel’s madhouse of comically conflicting motivations among political operatives, observers and civilian pawns suggests one of Alex Cox’s socially conscious fantasias. Too bad Seftel doesn’t have a cult following already, because War, Inc. is a clearer, funnier and deeper prophecy than Richard Kelley’s exasperating Southland Tales. This non-nihilistic film is a vision of our political complicity and humane potential.

Natalie tells Hauser, “Everyone has politics, even if they don’t know it.” War, Inc. doesn’t pander. It is worth discovering. If you see it back-to-back with Crystal Skull, you’ll know there’s a lot more to say about both.

Benicio Del Toro, ‘Latino Brad Pitt’, wins Cannes award as ‘Che’

by Claire Rosemberg

CANNES, France (AFP) – Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro, the Puerto Rican-born star often dubbed the “Latino Brad Pitt”, won Cannes’ Best Actor award Sunday for his role as “Che” Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s film on the revolutionary hero.

“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara,” said the actor, after accepting his second big award under the US director’s helmsmanship.

“I wouldn’t be here without Che Guevera, and through all the awards the movie gets you’ll have to pay your respects to the man.”

And taking one reporter’s question after Cannes’ red-carpet awards ceremony, all Del Toro saw was her “Che” T-shirt. “I like the shirt,” he said several times.

Del Toro, 41, transmutes into a larger-than-life Che in the marathon four-hours-plus movie.

“Che” charts two episodes in the life of the guerrilla hero — the late 1950s ouster of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista alongside Fidel Castro, and Che’s subsequent aborted bid to bring the Cuban revolution to Bolivia.

Some critics slammed the film shot in Spanish for its length and meticulous documentary-style presentation, as well as for failing to focus on the politically controversial aspects of the Cuban revolution.

Soderbergh needed to tighten it for average movie-goers, they said.

The US director back in 2000 propelled Del Toro into the movie limelight, when he bagged best supporting Oscar for his role as a restrained Mexican police officer walking the moral high ground in “Traffic”.

Del Toro, original name Benicio Monserrate Rafael Del Toro Sanchez, also played five years earlier in the blockbuster “The Usual Suspects”, where he was the mumbling gangster Fenster.

He has also been directed by the head of this year’s Cannes jury Sean Penn, in 1990 “The Indian Runner” and “The Pledge”, 2001.

Born in Puerto Rico to lawyer parents, he moved to the United States at the age of nine when his mother died and studied commerce before deciding, secretly, to change to acting.

Del Toro, who has a quiet but immensely strong presence, was involved from the start on the “Che” film, which took nine years of research and 60 million dollars to complete.

In Cannes for the screening, he recounted how like the average American he grew up with a bad guy image of Cuba’s hero until stumbling on a book on the guerrilla leader in Mexico.

“He had a really warm smile. I bought the book and then read more. The love people had for this man made me more interested,” he said.

Del Toro challenge Cannes with epic Che portrait

CANNES, France — Unless it is one of his “Ocean’s Eleven” casino romps, Steven Soderbergh never makes things easy for an audience.

With his epic film biography of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Soderbergh defiantly has made the story he wanted to see, one that will prove a very tough sell to some audiences.

The two-part saga runs four hours, 30 minutes. It is almost entirely in Spanish, a particular challenge for U.S. viewers who dislike subtitles.

It dispenses with many cliches of the biopic, offering virtually no insight into the origin of Che’s brand of humanism, instead presenting impressionistic glimpses of Che’s idealism in action during the Cuban revolution and his attempt to foment a similar transformation in Bolivia.

Soderbergh was prepared for reporters’ skepticism on all fronts at a Cannes news conference Thursday.

On shooting in Spanish:

“You can’t make a film with any level of credibility in this case unless it’s in Spanish,” Soderbergh said.

“I hope we’re reaching a time where you go make a movie in another culture, that you shoot in the language of that culture. I’m hoping the days of that sort of specific brand of cultural imperialism have ended.”

On the length:

“Just the further you get into it, it felt like if you’re going to have context, then it’s just going to have to be a certain size,” Soderbergh said.

On the unconventional structure:

“I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people … upset that something’s not conventional,” Soderbergh said.

“The bottom line is we’re just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That’s really it. And the scenes were chosen strictly on the basis of, ‘Yeah, what does that tell us about his character?’”

Starring Benicio Del Toro, the Oscar-winning co-star of Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” as Guevara, the two films were shot as “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla.”

The cast includes Franka Potente, Catalina Sandino Moreno and Demian Bichir as Fidel Castro. Soderbergh buddy Matt Damon, part of the star-studded “Ocean’s Eleven” ensemble, makes a brief appearance.

“The Argentine” juxtaposes Guevara and Castro’s late 1950s triumph in Cuba with flashbacks to their early planning days in Mexico and Che’s visit to New York City in the mid-1960s, when he was greeted with condemnation and death threats over the Castro regime’s iron-fisted rule.

“Guerrilla” follows the downfall of Guevara as his grass-roots campaign in Bolivia degenerates into a handful of scraggly, starving rebels on the run from vastly superior government forces in the jungle.

Che was executed in Bolivia in 1967. Much of the world now has only a superficial grasp of Che as a symbol of revolution from T-shirts and posters depicting his boldly smiling face.

While it may be hard to persuade audiences to see it a first time, the story requires repeated viewings to really appreciate it, said Del Toro, also a producer on the project.

“It reminds me of the painter who did a portrait of this lady, and when he gave it to the lady, the lady said, ‘That portrait doesn’t look anything like me.’ And the painter said, ‘Oh, it will,’” Del Toro said.

“I really think that eventually, those people, when they see the movie for the third time, they’ll start seeing things, they’ll start seeing dimensions and angles, maybe a look or a smile or the use of this or a character here and there. … I know them very well, but I’m still finding stuff.”

The films were presented as one entry at Cannes under the name “Che.” They played without credits, the way Soderbergh would prefer to see it initially released to general audiences.

“Here’s what I would like to do is, every time it opens in a town, let’s say, that for a week, you can see it as one movie for the first week, and then you split it off into two films,” Soderbergh said.

“That’s what I would like to do is have a sort of roadshow engagement, no credits … a printed program that comes with the movie. To me, that would be an event.”

How the films actually will play in the U.S. and other countries will depend on deals Soderbergh strikes as he shops it around to distributors at Cannes.

“Che” is competing for the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, which Soderbergh won with his feature debut, “sex, lies and videotape,” in 1989.

While Soderbergh talked seriously and passionately about his desire to make the films, he also had a ready wisecrack for his motivation:

“It’s all a very elaborate way for us to sell our own T-shirts,” Soderbergh said.

This documentary should be quite interesting, as anything related to Diego usually is. Hopefully, it’ll be released in the US. A movie about his life was supposedly in the works with Benicio Del Toro a while back but I don’t know if its going to be released or if it’s even in production.

A great movie about his extraordinary life, on and off the field, needs to be made.

Maradona: Larger than life on Emir Kusturica documentary

The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 21st 2008, 4:00 AM

At last, he says, someone has his story right.

The hard-living, larger-than-life Argentine hero was at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday for the premiere of “Maradona by Kusturica,” by Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica (“Underground”), the film world’s counterpart to the over-the-top Maradona.

The movie puts a spotlight on the cult of personality around the 47-year-old Maradona, who led Argentina to the 1986 World Cup title and the final in 1990.

Hilarious footage shows followers of the “Maradonian Church” formed by worshipping fans, who sing his name to the tune of “Ave Maria,” build religious shrines to him and even celebrate a wedding in his honor.

It also explores Maradona’s past cocaine use, his relationship with his two daughters and his political side.

On screen, Maradona shows off his tattoo of Fidel Castro. He says he would never shake hands with Prince Charles. And he calls President Bush a “piece of human garbage.”

Off screen, he’s just as outspoken.

“It seems that when you become a well-known figure you aren’t allowed to talk about the United States or Bush,” Maradona told reporters.

“There are a lot of subjects that you aren’t allowed to talk about anymore. But Emir showed me the respect that every human being deserves. Even if you’re a soccer player, you have the right to express your opinions about somebody who’s a murderer.”

While Maradona’s rivalry with Brazilian great Pele doesn’t come up in the film, it did at the Cannes news conference, where Maradona insisted he was the greater player — a viewpoint disputed by many soccer fans.

“I promised my daughters that I wouldn’t talk about Pele, but well, I can’t prevent myself — I regret it for him,” Maradona said.

“If I hadn’t done all the bad things that I’ve done in my life, Pele would never have been able to come along as No. 2 behind me, because he used to go to bed at 10 o’clock at night, whereas I was still out on the tiles until 5 o’clock in the morning. That’s the big difference between us.”

Maradona, who gamely dribbled a ball and balanced it on his head like a seal for Cannes paparazzi, said his wild past was behind him.

“I’ve abandoned all those bad habits,” a slimmed-down, cleaned-up Maradona said. “Now I have a different life. And above all I’m not living at 100 miles an hour as I used to. I enjoy life.”

Maradona, who cooperated with Kusturica on the project, said the movie is the first about him that he’s ever appreciated.

nytimes.com

John Cusack Goes to War
By DAVID CARR

POLITICAL satire has its work cut out for it in the current environment. An unpopular war, the tortured rhetoric of a government defending its various pratfalls and news media that many see as complicit in the mess have created a burlesque – one that may not require annotation or exaggeration. Not that John Cusack isn’t willing to give it a whirl. His “War, Inc.,” which opens in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, is a satire that goes over the top and stays there.

Mr. Cusack is one of the writers as well as the star of the film, set in a mythological country called Turaqistan over the course of a militarized trade show in a privatized war. (Joshua Seftel is the
director.) The well-compensated conqueror and savior is a company named Tamerlane, which delivers a full menu of capabilities, including leveling the country with bombs, rebuilding what’s destroyed, and even using its war-making technology to glue limbs back on victims.

As a conflicted mercenary seeking a toehold amid the lucrative mayhem, Mr. Cusack has some big-name accomplices, including his sister Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley and,
underneath a mop of black hair, Hilary Duff.

Given the number of war-theme movies (“Redacted,” “In the Valley of Elah” and “Lions for Lambs,” among others) that have been disasters at the box office, and given that moviegoers may not be much in the mood for a comedy about Mideast misadventures, Mr. Cusack is well aware of the obstacles on the road ahead.

“We’ve had strong reactions both ways,” he said, speaking from London, where he is filming “Shanghai,” about an American expat visiting that city right before Pearl Harbor. “We wanted to make something and not just talk about it, and we were aware of the challenges that went with it.”

Those who suggest that the movie’s core premise – war as a profit engine – is so five years ago are right in a way. Mr. Cusack and his co-writers, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, have been grinding away
almost since the start of the very long war it takes aim at.

“We have been swimming upstream from the beginning,” said Grace Loh, Mr. Cusack’s producing partner. “There was a long struggle to get it funded, and when we didn’t really get the kind of budget we had hoped, we filmed in Bulgaria and really tried to make the best movie we could with the money we had.”

The resulting $8 million film, distributed by a small independent (First Look Studios), plays America’s aspirations and darker characteristics for both laughs and dramatic effect. The initial responses from the critics were as roundly negative as many opinions about the Iraq war. The Hollywood Reporter called it a “complete misfire,” and Spout Blog suggested it was “a debacle.”

Mr. Cusack, who had a box-office miss with the war-themed “Grace Is Gone” last year, prefers to concentrate on word of mouth in the antiwar movement and said he thinks that at some point there will be a backlash to the backlash. As an opponent of the war – a question about it sparked a 10-minute soliloquy about bloody corporate and government mis- and malfeasance – he is less concerned with critical fatigue than public apathy. He predicted that the public will identify with the revulsion of Hauser, the “disaster capitalist” he plays, who eventually decides that he is pointing his gun in the wrong direction.

“We are just trying to take the current trends to their logical ends,” Mr. Cusack said of a film in which tanks running roughshod over Turaqistan carry enough advertising logos to decorate a Nascar
vehicle. “It is really just a short walk to an entirely privatized war. And the irony is that the corporations that are benefiting from the war aren’t paying for it. The taxpayers are.”

A cartoon version of Western culture, replete with a dastardly ex-vice president played by Mr. Aykroyd and an Americanized Middle Eastern pop tart named Yonica Babyyeah played by Ms. Duff, “War,
Inc.” gives way to a straight-up morality play that has echoes of “Grosse Pointe Blank,” a movie in which Mr. Cusack played another hit man who carried some existential baggage in additional to lethal
hardware.

Mr. Leyner, the author of the post-postmodern novel “Et Tu, Babe” (whose protagonist, a fictionalized version of himself, is, according to the inside flap jacket, “a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha
793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster”), said the combat capitalism was just a backdrop for themes ripped not from the headlines but from history.

“I have always been interested in the Samurai movies and westerns, the lone wolf or ronin who has lost the patronage of his master and roams the countryside,” Mr. Leyner said, dressed down for an
interview on iChat in his writer’s uniform of a T-shirt and a few days’ worth of whiskers. “We took those themes and overlaid them on a part of the world that had been destroyed by a privatized war machine and then colonized to literally capitalize on the suffering.”

“It is really about the characters and what happens to them,” he continued. “Again and again in the movie the characters are hiding, saying that if you knew the real me, you’d despise me even more. To
me what happens to the characters in the movie is far more interesting than the polemical content of the movie.”

There is no shortage of polemicists, including Walken, the spymaster played by Mr. Kingsley. His single dimension – evil writ large – serves as a foil for Hauser, who develops a distaste for his own
baloney, including his argument early in the movie with the truth-to-power crusading journalist Natalie Hegalhuzen, played by Ms. Tomei: “What are we supposed to do? Turn our backs on all the
entrepreneurial possibilities? Business is a uniquely human response to a moral or cosmic crisis. Whether there’s a tsunami or a sustained aerial bombardment, there’s the same urgent call for urban renewal.”

O.K., so maybe that’s about as subtle as the maimed but cheery chorus line of amputees dancing anew with assistance from the same Tamerlane technology that removed their legs in the first place. But a satirist has to be on a dead run to stay ahead of the news these days.

Mr. Cusack said the inspiration for the amputee bit came from a news item about Donald H. Rumsfeld, when he was defense secretary, making an appearance at a ski tournament for Iraq war veterans who had lost limbs.

“Just last week there was a guy talking about opening up a kind of Disneyland in Iraq,” he said. “Some of what is happening is so absurd, so outrageous, that you have to do something wild to capture
what is actually under way.”