Caos Calmo

In my blog of yesterday, I egregiously misquoted the Gazette's John Griffin badly on the subject of the Nanni Moretti movie, Caos Calmo. My apologies. I've subsequently elided the gaffe out of existence. Here's what John Griffin really wrote:

Two men are fooling around on a beach. They hear cries for help, rush into the water and save two women from drowning. Their efforts unacknowledged, they climb into a car, and drive to one of the men’s homes, a villa in the hills. There, his 10 year-old daughter comes running to him, crying “I tried to call you”. Her mother, his wife, lies dead on the patio, after falling from an open window.

So begins Antonello Grimaldi’s wonderful little big Italian movie Caos Calmo (Quiet Chaos), after the award-winning book of the same name by Sandro Veronesi. The man whose wife is dead and daughter is crying is Nanni Moretti’s Pietro, a big-shot executive in a company facing merger with multinational forces. The other man on the beach is his brother Carlo (Allesandro Gassman), a hot jeans designer. Pietro’s little girl is Claudia (Blu Yoshimi).

At the funeral, many offer support. The restrained Pietro thanks them but has other plans. He takes leave of a business in political turmoil, packs his kid in the family BMW wagon, drives her to school, and stays there. He repeats the routine every day, through late summer, into fall and early winter. If you want him, he’s in the park across the school, or, in a local restaurant, or hanging with locals. When school’s out, he picks Claudia up, and they go home, or have dinner with Carlo, or shop, or talk. She is his world.

His world is also the area around the school. Grimaldi does a brilliant job of drawing in minor characters, establishing routines, and forcing major corporate players and family alike to adapt to Pietro’s routine. He is, obviously, grieving the loss of a wife who had been unbalanced for years. But he does not show it, and, perhaps following suit, neither does his daughter. Life goes on. The seasons change.

There is so much more to this deeply empathetic, very funny, very sad film than these words can convey. The quiet observation of the ordinary, while turmoil rages beneath the surface, is exquisitely expressed by Moretti, know more often for wearing his heart on his sleeve. The support cast is terrific, the soundtrack illuminating, and the entire enterprise a ringing endorsement of everyday human activity. See it.

Movie critics - Endangered Species

This not a blog I particularly looked forward to posting. Both at McGill and with my-pov.ca, I swore to myself I would focus exclusively on celebrating movies and what makes us love our movies, still the greatest bang-for-our-buck. They buffet our emotions, mold our outlook and leave us enthralled.

However three separate emails to me, each disparaging recent ‘Your movie sucks’ reviews in the Gazette, drags me reluctantly into contextualizing movie reviewing into a North American context. A glut of movie critic firings and layoffs at The Village Voice, Newsday, Newsweek, Denver, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale are making movie reviewers an endangered species as newspapers slide into oblivion, revenues declining, under pressure from Web alternatives.

Roger Ebert despaired. ‘ We are being trained not to think. It is not about the disappearance of film critics. We are the canaries. It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out. The news is still big. It’s the newspapers that got small.’

Ah! Gloria Swanson! Where is she now?

At http://blogs.sltrib.com/movies/labels/disappearing%20critics.htm, is a list of 49 movie critics who have disappeared. It feels like a conspiracy. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper is only a virtual reality. The Detroit Free Press is the biggest newspaper to expunge its film critics entirely, borrowing movie copy they don’t have to pay for out of payroll.

The Montreal Gazette may be the next in line. It wants the contractual freedom to do like the Detroit Free Press. Layoffs and buyouts are every Gazette journalist’s daily nightmare-of-life. The parent company, Canwest Publishing Inc. wants to centralize its operations, allowing it to outsource movie reviewing. And no doubt, pick up syndicated fanboy items. As a consequence, Gazette staffers, such as John Griffin, no longer appear to have much of a future. Not only is the job security of Gazette writers at high risk, but also for readers like us, it’s greatly minimizing future of local reviewing and reporting. Indeed, the National Post and Global Television – other deep-in-debt Canwest enterprises – also seem to be facing a haunting, bleak future themselves.

Movie reviewers, even in the best of times, have always been under pressure by editors, by distributors, to provide suck-up dumbassery fawning verbiage, designed to attract distributor advertising, invite junkets to exotic locations. How indeed any critic decides what he likes more than another, when and where to ladle cutline praise has always been a mystery to me. But that's beside the point. Different folk like different movies and most don't need nobheads telling us what is good.

That being said, for our kinds of movies – non-Hollywood, foreign, small - critical accolades mean the difference between their relevance and obscurity, their box office success or failure. Critics who provide well-rounded information with an opinion attached, make the difference. Otherwise small movies would never be found. The Lives of Others found its audience only after being championed by critics. One Week, a small Canadian movie opened strong, thanks to John Griffin’s ***** review. The extinction of reviewers is sure to have profound repercussions. Who’s gonna championing the movies, lacking crowd-pleasing content or marketing muscle their way into public consciousness?

It is for precisely this reason I set up my-pov.ca. Over our lifetimes, movie reviewing has mutated several times. In the 50s, spurred on by Le Cahiers du Cinema, it became grunge beat intellectual. In the 60s, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael made it celebrity-glossy. In the 80s, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert took it to TV. Now the Internet generation is democratizing it, pretty much anyone with a website, now an arbiter of taste. So the movie scourge is not going away, just disappearing from our newspapers, and reincarnating onto digital platforms.

And yet, if Canwest management has its way, I sense a dire abyss in front of us: without local beat reporters (love ‘em or hate ‘em), the Gazette will inevitably bypass indigenous movies, ignore local festivals, personalities, tastes and concerns. Great movies live and die by erudite film critics getting behind them. People aren’t going to go to movies, because of some joker like me, blogging the Internet. They are capable of calibrating their opinions against the aesthetics of John Griffin, Brendan Kelly, Bill Brownstein. We'll miss them when they're gone.

Sunshine Cleaning

I quite understand why the distributor may have been queasy uncomfortable, promoting Sunshine Cleaning as a movie centred on death, grief, loss and the ignominious messes left behind: biohazards, suicide, messy entrails. Forget that as a bait for a money-making date flick.

Instead, the hucksters hitched their promotional wagon to Little Miss Sunshine, that charming dysfunctional all-in-the-family road-trip movie of a few years back. Because both Sunshine Cleaning and Little Miss Sunshine share the same producers, were both shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Alan Arkin once again in the loveable geezer role, they created a smudge in the public mind, caricaturing Sunshine Cleaning as a screwball sequel of sorts: yet another quirky Sundance comedy (or worse, an upbeat dramedy! – ugh!). ‘This year's Juno,’ boasts the TV blurb. Unfortunately, quirky comedy, Sunshine Cleaning is not (although you could never tell by the Sunshine Cleaning theatrical trailer).

If that weren’t bad enough, Sunshine Cleaning deals with even more forbidden Hollywood taboos: smalltown America, working class women, exploitation. Think back to the last good Hollywood movie you saw, centring on exploited working class women. Here’s my (very short) list: Norma Rae (1979), Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Fargo (1996). Indeed Norma Rae, in the modern era, is the only studio movie I can think of that even depicts deplorable factory conditions for most working women. And yet, working class women have been the centre of wonderful movies from elsewhere. British director Mike Leigh’s entire career is a paean, celebrating working class women’s lives: Happy-Go-Lucky (2008), Vera Drake (2004), Career Girls (1997), Secrets and Lies (1996).

Sam Goldwyn long ago brayed, ‘If you want to send a message, call Western Union,’ his argument being that Hollywood moviemakers were in the movie business, not the social change business. In other words, don’t come looking for Hollywood moguls to shed crocodile tears over some dame fighting for health and pension benefits, struggling to pay her electric bill. We’re capitalists, in this racket for greed. Nobody can make a buck, seeing those women on screen, being Goldwyn’s argument. Our studios are in the mega-hit business; we don't make small movies. Go away.

Unspoken is the notion that Hollywood mustn’t threaten America’s established order. As studio execs, we understand employers may exploit you, lie to you, cheat you, take away from you what is rightfully yours -- your health, a decent wage, a fit place to work. We may indulge in some of the same practices ourselves. What? Make movies to incite the downtrodden? Are you cracked?

As a consequence, Hollywood working class girls, when they surface, have Cinderella story-arcs - think Jennifer Aniston/Julia Roberts – happily-ever-after upwardly mobile into their marriage bed with their prince. Fade out.

And yet, times are changing. President Obama was elected on an ideal that we do, in fact, share common ground, and that if we ignore the plight of the less fortunate, we may well be ignoring the future of our society itself.

The upshot of all this promotional flimflammery is that some uncomfortable (mostly male) critics have taken to lambasting Sunshine Cleaning for something the filmmakers never intended it to be (go to Rotten Tomatoes.com, to see just how uncomfortable!). Sunshine Cleaning is dark, not bright. It deals with dramas of unselfconscious real adults. At a time when most of us are losing economic ground, working class women arguably are in worse trouble than ever. Sunshine Cleaning speaks to its times, centres on badly damaged siblings, attempting to jump-start flawed lives, stars two charismatic young actors: Amy Adams (the young nun in Doubt) and Emily Blunt (the hectoring British assistant in Devil Wears Prada). It’s not a perfect movie: just a meditation by several talented women on the enduring consequences of death and its residual messes. Sunshine Cleaning is not a quirky comedy.

Remakes, Sequels, Prequels, Spinoffs & Plagiarisms

Hollywood begats (be they remakes, sequels, prequels, spinoffs or plagiarisms) receive sniggering scorn from media wiseacres. Fair enough.

But while watching Nikita Mikhalkov’s 12, an honorable and fascinating reworking of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men on Monday morning, my mind wandered off to the many credible, even improved redux versions that are every bit as distinguished inspirations as their originals.

Here are some variations on a theme that came to mind:

• A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was Sergio Leone’s plagiarism of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961). Kurosawa sued and won.

• A Star Is Born (1937 – William Wellman with Janet Gaynor) became in 1954, Cukor w. Garland and, in 1976 w. Streisand.

• Ramon Navarro’s silent Ben-Hur (1925) became Charlton Heston’s epic (1959)

• J. Lee Thompson’s Cape Fear (1962 with Mitchum and Peck) was every bit as terrifying as Scorsese’s 1991 remake.

• Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait (1978) was originally the charming Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941).

• Fay Wray’s tragic antihero King Kong (1933) had two so-so remakes in 1976 and 2005, neither as affecting as the original.

• Rashomon (1951) inspired several remakes notably The Outrage (1964) and Courage Under Fire (1991), none anywhere as awesome as the original.

• Steve Martin’s Roxanne (1987) was first José Ferrar’s 1950 b&w Cyrano de Bergerac. And of course, long ago, Edmond Rostand’s play.

• Sabrina, the 1954 original with Bogart and Hepburn was so much better than the 1998 Harrison Ford remake.

• The Magnificent Seven (1960 - Sturges) was originally Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954).

• Hitchcock made The Man Who Knew Too Much twice – 1934 & 1965 (the 2nd time with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day).

• Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962) & Jonathan Demme’s Manchurian Candidate (2004) are two fifferent animals, exploring two different Americas, two different wars, two different mindsets.

• Three Men and a Baby (1987) was much funnier as the French farce - Trois hommes et un couffin (1985).

• Mel Brooks antic To Be Or Not To Be (1983) was a faithful remake of the Lubitch 1941 movie of the same title.

• Sleepless in Seattle was an homage to the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr chickflick, An Affair to Remember.

• Al Pacino’s Scent of a Woman (1992) was originally a delicious Dino Risi film, Profumo di Donna, starring Vittorio Gassman.

So next time you’re renting dvds, and they’ve got two-for-one promotions, here are some pairing you might want to try. And on this Sunday, watch with interest how Nikita Mikhalkov explores the Sidney Lumet/Reginald Rose profoundly American ideas about reasonable doubt, and turns them into Russian obsessions about compassion, tolerance and co-existence.

Like most of the films on my list above, the inspiration of 12 Angry Men has made for a fascinating remake.

12

This blog is a memory nudge of sorts – for those planning on attending our Sunday March 22nd screening of 12 but without sufficient time to rent the dvd of the film classic, 12 Angry Men. A movie maven somewhere in Ulan Bator may not have seen Sidney Lumet’s trenchant 12 Angry Men juryroom drama, but for this blog, I’m taking as given, that all my-pov.ca readers know this story and won’t be disturbed by my indiscretions. [ATTENTION: This blog reveals content of the movie.]

Rescreening 12 Angry Men last week, I was once again in thrall with Sydney Lumet’s galaxy of all-white-ordinary-good-guy movie stars from my delinquent teens: So many went on to become major Hollywood stars. In 12 Angry Men, they are 50s archetypes: Fonda (Liberal voice of reason), Ed Begley (the bigot), E.G. Marshall (the Corporate Counsellor), Martin Balsam (the conciliator), Jack Klugman (Oscar from The Odd Couple), Lee J. Cobb (self-made capitalist), Jack Warden (ghetto kid), John Fiedler (who went on to become Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons). One juror is Eastern European. None seem Jewish.

Lumet in his career made over 50 well-acted, tightly written, sliceoflife movies, a lot of them very fine: Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which, except for Serpico (1973), earned him Academy Award nominations.

Looking at 12 Angry Men with 2009 eyes, I had no longer remembered that the Lumet’s accused was Puerto Rican, that indeed puertoricanness was a significant issue in the Fonda jury initially presuming the accused guilty. 12 Angry Men turns on one juror (Fonda), sowing a seed of reasonable doubt, discrediting faulty courtroom evidence.

But today, 12 Angry Men decodes differently to my eyes: a loose regard for truth within the courtroom evolves into home truths amongst the twelve Fonda jurists: their reckless willingness to categorize people unlike themselves as objects they hate or fear most, blinds them to court facts; they reassure one another that of course they are nothing like the accused. Indeed, given 12 Angry Men was released midst the 1950’s Red Scare, the accused’s puertoricanness could well have been code for Jew or Commie bastard (both Lumet and Rose were Jewish). In the end, the happy-ever-after ending determines America is safe for democracy, thanks to the Henry Fonda WASPs of this world.

Still Lumet's 12 Angry Men is a classic, and made the viewing of Nikita Mikhalkov's 12 this morning that much more enjoyable. Mikhalkov's 12 is not Lumet's 12 Angry Men. Nor is Mikhalkov's Moscow, 2008 Lumet's New York, 1956. Two vastly different worlds. Yet Mikhalkov's homage to Lumet is clear: he superimposes on the opening frame of his movie: Seek the truth not in the mundane details of daily life but in the essence of life itself. A foundation Sidney Lumet used to build a distinguished career.

Sunday, March 15, we welcome William Weintraub

This Sunday, March 15th, after the One Week screening in the AMC, we welcome Bill Weintraub, author, scholar and all-round gentleman. Bill, in his heyday, was a National Film Board hyphenate: writer/producer/director on some 150 films.

As part of the Canadian Centennial, he co-produced/co-directed a 16 minute short, Celebration, which we will screen in the Comedy Nest. Like One Week, Celebration captures moods, costumes, and poses of a country, on the eve of its one hundredth birthday. Oscar Peterson and his trio provided the soundtrack.

One Week

One Week, the AMC movie we’ll be screening Sunday at 11:45 am, is a classic road movie, one of my favourite movie genres. Here are 17 reasons why:

Apocalypse Now – certainly in my top five Best Movies ever
Bonnie and Clyde – Warren and Faye robbed banks
Butch Cassidy – vintage Redford/Newman
Diarios de Motocicleta – early Che, nomadically finding himself
Duel – Spielberg’s classic student movie – a man, a car and a semi…
Easy Rider – Dennis Hopper’s trip with Fonda
Goin’ Down the Road - Don Shebib’s beauty…
Grapes of Wrath – John Ford’s John Steinbeck’s dust bowl odyssey
Into the Wild – Sean Penn’s extraordinary rending of that Krakauer book
It Happened One Night – Gable and Colbert and Capra
La Strada – the Fellini bildungsroman,
Little Miss Sunshine - a family's trip to a kidlet beauty pageant
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – three Aussie drag queens
Raising Arizona – vintage Coen Bros.
The Wizard of Oz – the yellow brick road movie of course…
Thelma and Louise – Babes on the run…
Two For the Road – Audrey Hepburn & Finney caper across France

The Road Movie’s a form that traces all the way back to Homer’s Odyssey, I suppose – that questing nomadic soul, traversing a landscape in an endless search of himself/herself. Innocent beginnings. Suffocated by mere existence. No specific destination. Spectacular landscapes. Haywire adventures. Encounters with characters even odder than themselves.

Top Ten Lists on the Internet abound, debating what makes which road movie qualify as the greatest. Here are some sites:

http://www.filmsite.org/roadfilms.html
http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/road.jsp
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Road-Movies-Made-70s/lm/1GZT0JLA8QJ8Z
http://images.imdb.de/keyword/road-movie/

I’m not the only one that loves the genre. One Week is a modest entertaining movie, with no great aspirations: a guy in trouble, quests after an understanding of the land and the body in which he lives. And the lives that surround his own. Canada the landscape, is a major costar, filmed with all the loving adoration cameramen used to reserve for Katherine Hepburn. John Griffin of the Gazette gave One Week ***** - a high compliment indeed - and people flocked to it since. One Week opened last weekend. This Friday, the AMC is adding a second print, an almost unheard of compliment for a Canadian movie.

So we’ll see you at 11:45 a.m. at the AMC. The movie runs 94 minutes, so that we’ll be into the Comedy Nest before 2 p.m. For those wanting to purchase or pick up extra vouchers, we’ll be in the AMC Atrium Sunday by 10:30 a.m.

Peter

We also welcome Diane Gignac

This week, I also chatted with Diane Gignac, who with her 13 year old daughter, last summer traveled to Cuba (thanx to an organization called Aro Coopéraction), and once there traversed the island from East to West on an expedition entitled Sur La Route de Che. For three weeks, they traveled the route Che took, learning Cuban history and I would presume geography. She's got a video of her trip, and we'll screen chunks of it.

So come enjoy Bert Tougas, Claude Morin and Diane Gignac. They'll provide us with three different ways with understanding Che. And if you wish, bring a friend.

We welcome Claude Morin:

This Sunday at the Comedy Nest, we are very pleased to welcome Claude Morin, Honorary Pofessor in the History Department at the University of Montreal. Amongst his many roles, Claude's's been president of the Canadian Association of Latin American studies, director of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, director of the Centre de recherches caraïbes de l'Université de Montréal, and head of the History Department at the U of M from 1997 to 2005.

Claude's authored/edited six volumes, two on the history of Mexico, others on Canadian-Latin American relations. He's also authored numerous articles, appeared on various media, commenting on events in Cuba, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Sunday, 1:30 pm in the Comedy Nest

In preparation for our Sunday @ 1:30 p.m. discussion on Che, go to our website, my-pov.ca and you'll discover a cornucopia of preparatory treats for Sunday afternoon at the Comedy Nest:

• On our landing page is a 4:46 min. interview with Steven Soderbergh, discussing the Red One (the famous camera). Then after the invue, you'll find a variety of clips (14 in all) from YouTube, all about The Red. Most of these are very technical, so you can skip over them but some might be of interest to you:
• a psa (public service announcement, using The Red;
• : 18 of a screen test - note the light contrast
• : 53 sec of another test
• a :53 sec extract from Peter Jackson's short, Crossing the Line, the first time The Red was used;
• : 51 sec of skiing camera tests
• :30 commercial for the camera
• 6:58 documentary on how to mount different lenses

Then if you click on the COMING UP tab, you'll find:

• clips from a Soderbergh encounter at last fall's New York Film Festival. It's the kind of access only the Internet can provide, a rare chunk of a filmmaker talking aloud about his movie. You will see the many problems he's having, figuring out how to market the movie; the differences in format between the two parts;. how he got it financed; how he thinks that the roadshow will not work.
• 4:19 - Benicio del Toro winning at the Cannes Film Festival
• trailers in Spanish and English;
• an invue with del Toro from Toronto.

Later this afternoon, I will post bios of our special guests, and their CVs.

So organize your Sunday afternoon, 1:30 p.m. at the Comedy Nest. Bring a guest (admission for guests is only $10 for the afternoon session).

peter

Che

Given their American Revolution born-again fervour, given their boisterous Good-Time-Charlie approach to celebrating the 4th of July in all its Main Street gaudiness, given their Stars and Stripes Forever hymnal renditions before whatever athletic endeavour, given their Super Bowl Sunday flypasts, given their endless Jeopardy contestants' knowledge of the most arcane American Revolution trivia, I figured American movie reviewers might view Che, a movie centring on the Cuban Revolution with a degree of sympathy.

Naïve me.

It’s a mug's game, determining how consequential a new movie will be: it may seem more important than those the past, because we talk about it, write about it, it affects us directly, appear more significant than anything on dvd. Steven Soderbergh's Che, for example. Here’s the reviewer from Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post:

MEET Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4½ hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

Che's point of view as the moment of expiration arrives, sharing with us a vision of a blinding white light as the furry comandante slips into Commie heaven. Say hi to the Rosenbergs for me! Fidel says, "See ya soon."

Ya dirty Commie bastard!

Soderbergh had been quoted, all over the place, saying: I was drawn to Che as a subject for a movie (or two) not only because his life reads like an adventure story, but because I am fascinated by the technical challenges that go along with implementing any large-scale political idea. I wanted to detail the mental and physical demands these two campaigns required, and illustrate the process by which a man born with an unshakable will discovers his own ability to inspire and lead others.

This is more or less the Che movie I enjoyed: a director telling his adventure story, about this interesting guy. But given that damned movie reviewer eye-of-the-beholder syndrome, it’ s not what many American newspaper reviewers saw.

At mrqe.com (movie review query engine), my favourite movie website, I scanned about 20 American big-city papers reviews. Not one connected the American Revolution with the Cuban Revolution. Not one alluded to overthrow of a brutal tyrant, Fulgencio Batista. Here’s Variety, the Hollywood tradepaper:

[Che ]does give …ample airing to communist ideological thinking -- and presents American and Latin American authorities so exclusively as cardboard mouthpieces of imperialism and abusive dictatorships, respectively … few people will likely see the picture, at least in its current state, that there’s little chance it will have much cultural impact other than by the fact of its very existence.

Aha! Cardboard mouthpieces of imperialism! And Fulgencio Batista was not an abusive dictator, nor a cardboard mouthpiece of imperialism. Nor was King George III. And the American Empire of 1959 was definitely not the British Empire of 1976. Got it.

At the San Francisco Chronicle, William Randolph Hearst’s first paper (and fictionalized in Citizen Kane, here’s what their guy wrote:

If Soderbergh made as idol-worshiping an epic about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln - actual heroes with tangible, positive legacies - people would gag at the naive treatment. Perhaps with "Che," the hope is that audiences might be confused or browbeaten into reverence, into just assuming they're missing something.

Right. Naive treatment. That George Washington – the actual hero! His revolutionary guard didn’t slaughter anybody. That cherry tree/Potomac River stuff happened just the way George said it did. Unlike those poor Cubans driven into Miami, Washington and his troops never drove 75,000 United Empire Loyalists out of their homes and farms, into woebegone Nova Scotia and the Eastern townships.

The Brits saw Che differently:

Soderbergh’s Che epic dismantles the cliches and myths to craft a dream-like if frustrating essay on the heroism and the claustrophobia of war, perfectly centred by a compelling star performance.

…virile, muscular film-making, with an effortlessly charismatic performance by Benicio del Toro in the lead role.

Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first - and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world. We see only Che the public man, the legendary comandante, defiant to the last.


Canadians of course - fail miserably at revolutions - and so are ill-placed to judge them. We had the William Lyon Mackenzie’s Rebellion of 1837 of course, but that only lasted less than an hour, then both sides ran away. Or in more recent times, our Quebec Revolutions have been voting Referenda, whose questions are inscrutable. Nobody of course, is going to make an epic about a vote. We don’t have a rallying war cry – the land of the free and the home of the braaaavvvveee! - for a national anthem. Jets don’t scream overhead at our Grey Cup. Canadian sensibility when it comes to revolution is nul.

From the time Soderbergh’s movie premiered at Cannes last May, I suspect it never stood much of a chance. American distributors were balking at buying a 258-minute movie about a pinko Commie womanizing bastard serial-killer. Didn’t matter that Soderbergh'd made an epic. Didn’t matter that he employed spectacular techniques. Che now stands - no surprise here - a flop: has earned only slightly more than $1 milllion at box offices in North America.

I’ve always had considerable compassion for movie reviewers: a thankless pursuit – taken up by hacks of limited talent - providing informed opinion on uninformed movies, coerced by editors to be fawning in order to attract movie advertising, viewed by colleagues (much like sports writers), as pond scum within journalistic ranks. These dorks never looked at Che; all they saw was a bogeyman, hiding in their closet.

Here’s one last example, this from the New York Sun:

Mr. Del Toro invests Guevara with a winning and historically dubious innocence and patience that background Guevara's virulently Marxist and pro-Soviet dogma, and harsh approach to military discipline.

Just one final word before we abandon all discussion of Che: for those who missed The Motorcycle Diaries when first released, a sweeter, splendidly sentimentalized Che appears in this movie. American reviewers loved that Che. Soderbergh’s terrified them.

Meet Bert Tougas

Sunday, March 8th at the Comedy Nest, we welcome Bert Tougas!

Bert Tougas, first and foremost is my pal. We've worked together in the past, and now, as often as we can, we golf together from first warm day in April 'til the snow falls. (He's much better than me - don't ask!)

Bert's also one of Montreal's finest cameramen, has shot more than 10 movies, 30 movies-of-the-week, innumerable documentaries and commercials.

We welcome him especially becuz, most recently he has been using what the movie world refers to as 'the red' (seen here handholding it on his shoulder.)

Steven Soderbergh, both director and cameraman on Che, said after the Che shoot: This is the camera I've been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded onboard a camera light enough to hold with one hand. ...RED is going to change everything. Soderbergh was the first guy to use this high-resolution digital technology on a movie.

The Red threatens to to make 35-mm movie film obsolete. Which raises the conundrum: when films are no longer shot on film, what do we call them in the future?

We've been waiting for digital filmmaking for years, but most producers, directors and cameramen have always preferred celluloid. Electronic was for (sneer!) television. Star Wars' George Lucas (no surprise) was the first to fool around with it in 1999, adapting a Sony news camera. No one was much impressed with his results.

Money guys of course, love digital because it eliminates celluloid, saves over half a million bucks on film stock, development and processing costs per movie. But that's not the best. On Che, Soderbergh could shoot for nearly an hour, nonstop, his camera umbilically linked to a digital tape deck. His Red imagery matched Kodak in detail and richness, at least equal to 35-millimeter Kodak stock. And that's what makes the Red so compelling:the dazzle of Kodak analog, but easier to use and cheaper—by vast orders of magnitude.

Jim Jannard, founder of The Red, recently sold his Oakley sunglasses manufacturing business to Ray-Ban, for a $2.1 billion. Soderbergh borrowed two prototypes to shoot Che, later bought three for his next movie, The Informant. For months, industry watchers wondered if the Red was for real. Today, there's no question. Digital cinema that's all but indistinguishable from film is finally coming to a theatre near you.

And Bert will tell us all about it.