Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," has, in his first film as a director made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.
Todd McCarthy:"A folly." "A mess." "Great." These words came from some of the critics coming out of Steven Soderbergh's four-hour 18 minute Spanish-language Che Wednesday night. At the end there was slight applause; no boos. My own description: noble failure.
No doubt it will be back to the drawings board for "Che," Steven Soderbergh's intricately ambitious, defiantly non- dramatic four-hour eighteen-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he's portrayed
here.
And Jeff Wells has (positive) buzz to share:
The second half of Che, also known as Guerilla, just got out about a half-hour ago, and equally delighted although it's a different kind of film -- tighter, darker (naturally, given the story). But I've been arguing with some colleagues who don't like either film at all, or don't think it's commercial. Glenn Kenny and Kim Voynar feel as I do, but Anne Thompson is on the other side of the Grand Canyon. Peter Howell is in the enemy camp also.
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