Don't miss this rare opportunity to see the film in its entirety, with an intermission, before it is released as two features! Special admission applies

Soderbergh has said that the roadshow version of the film will not be released on DVD but released in two parts with the animated map that opens the roadshow's second half missing from part II, as well as the overture and intermission music.

IFC will make the films available Video on demand on January 21 on all major cable and satellite providers in both standard and high definition versions

'Che' spurs debate, Del Toro walkout
Sonny Bunch
Tuesday, January 27, 2009

A controversial new biopic about Cuban revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara is awakening old passions and provoking vigorous defenses and denunciations of the iconic revolutionary and - in the case of an interview with The Washington Times - a dramatic walkout.

"I'm getting uncomfortable," Benicio del Toro said after fielding a question about his new movie's portrayal of the Bolivian and Cuban revolutions. "I'm done. I'm done, I hope you write whatever you want. I don't give a damn."

With that, the Oscar-winning actor walked away, abruptly terminating an interview conducted late last week to discuss director Steven Soderbergh's "Che."

Heated discussion has inevitably followed this almost 4 1/2-hour film's portrayal of the revered and reviled figure who sought to spread armed insurrection throughout Latin America and became a romanticized icon of rebellion in the process.

Yet its star seems ill at ease in the hot seat.

Hunched over a plate of guacamole in the backroom of gourmet Mexican restaurant Oyamel in the District, Mr. del Toro seemed excited to discuss the picture, which he co-produced with Mr. Soderbergh and Laura Bickford. Though the movie has received mixed critical reception, Mr. del Toro won top acting honors at Cannes this year. In his acceptance speech, he dedicated the award to Guevara.

The film was screened in Cuba, to much applause.

"Del Toro is spectacular in the role of Che, not only in his physical resemblance but also in his brilliant interpretation," wrote Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party. "After more than five hours of screening, the Cuban public gave its endorsement with a strong ovation."

"Not knowing much about the history of Cuba, the history of Che, not being taught anything about it," Mr. del Toro says of his motivation for helping to bring the picture to fruition. "The image that I have or what has been told to me about this character is that he's kind of a cowboy - a bloodthirsty cowboy."

In doing research for the picture, Mr. del Toro was drawn to the writings of Guevara. "First, you start with what he wrote. What Che Guevara wrote. And he was a great writer, he wrote for years, so you start with that," he said.

Given the film's tenor, however - Guevara is shown telling a reporter that the most important thing for a revolutionary to have is "el amor," love - it's fair to ask to which parts of the Guevara bibliography the producer was exposed.

"He was a man full of hatred," said Armando Valladares, the Cuban dissident imprisoned by the revolutionary regime in 1960. Named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Mr. Valladares is the author of "Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag" and a board member of the Human Rights Foundation. Speaking through Glenda Aldana, a translator who works for the foundation, Mr. Valladares points to Guevara's writings as proof.

In his "Message to the Tricontinental," Guevara espoused "hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine."

"He took joy in killing counterrevolutionaries and was one of the most hard-edged, most Stalinist, pro-Soviet communists of the whole leadership," said Ronald Radosh, a Hudson Institute adjunct fellow and author of "Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left."

Mr. Soderbergh defended his film's perspective in an interview with The Washington Post at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"I've had people ask me: 'How can you make a movie about a murderer? A terrorist?'" he said. "What they don't understand is that I'm in support of everyone who appears on screen. I have to be. I take the position of everyone who's on screen. I'm not judging them one way or another."

At the same time, Mr. Soderbergh seems to harbor few illusions about just who Guevara was.

"I don't know that there's any place for a person like me in the society that he was trying to make," the director said. "I'm the poster child for a lot of the [stuff] that he was trying to eradicate."

Mr. del Toro doesn't deny that Guevara's persona had some darker aspects. "We have to omit a lot of stuff about his life," he said, "but we're not omitting the fact that he's for capital punishment, which is the essence of that."

In the movie, Guevara is shown executing a man. But the man is executed for raping a child, not for being disloyal to the cause of revolution. Troops are offered a chance to desert, and get nothing more than a scolding for their cowardice.

Mr. Valladares is less convinced of Guevara's dedication to due process.

"Che Guevara executed dozens and dozens of people who never once stood trial and were never declared guilty," he said. "In his own words, he said the following: 'At the smallest of doubt we must execute.' And that's what he did at the Sierra Maestra and the prison of Las Cabanas."

"They didn't do it blindly; they had trials," Mr. del Toro said. "They found them guilty, and they executed them - that's capital punishment."

But Mr. Radosh said it wasn't as simple as that.

"Huber Matos was guilty of nothing," he said. Mr. Matos was a commandant under Fidel Castro, one of the revolutionary's earliest followers and a fervent enemy of the Batista regime. But he was no communist, and when he saw where the country was headed, he wanted out.

"He didn't even want to go into opposition," said Mr. Radosh. "He simply said, 'I don't like the direction of the government, I don't want to be part of the government, I'll voluntarily relinquish my command.' He was convicted of treason, and after a sham trial that Fidel presided over, was sent to prison for a 25- to 30-year sentence."

Guevara was instrumental in the creation of Cuba's forced labor camps, which were used to imprison and extract work from those who had committed no crimes but were thought to be insufficiently revolutionary.

The policy of extrajudicial imprisonment that Guevara favored would later expand to include political activists of all stripes, musicians, artists, homosexuals and others deemed to be dangerous to the maintenance of the Stalinist regime.

Mr. del Toro grew agitated when these prisons were described as "concentration camps," a phrase that Mr. Valladares freely employs.

"I'm a survivor of those concentration camps. And I stand firm by my belief that they were concentration camps," he said. "The forced labor camps where I also worked, where dozens and dozens of political prisoners were murdered, where thousands were tortured, that's something that even the most ardent believers in Castro´s tyranny can't deny."

Critics of "Che" have suggested that the film whitewashes its protagonist's legacy and that it's impossible to understand the man by glorifying his more romantic aspects while ignoring his darker side.

"We can't cover it all," Mr. del Toro said. "You can make your own movie. You know? You can make your own movie. And let's see. Do the research."

Mr. Valladares is afraid that Mr. del Toro and Mr. Soderbergh's film will make people forget the reality that was Che Guevara's life.

"Benicio del Toro is just one of the many accomplices of the Cuban tyranny," he said. "All the murderers of people have had accomplices and people who made excuses for them. Stalin had them, Hitler had them, Pinochet had them, all the dictators have had apologists for them. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro also had them."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...stions-on-che/

Groovy Che?

by Humberto Fontova

"Groovy Name, Groovy Man, Groovy Politics!"
~ Benicio del Toro on Che Guevara

"Del Toro was fascinated with Che Guevara from the first time he heard his name mentioned in the Rolling Stones song Indian Girl," reads the introduction to an interview with Benicio del Toro last month in Britain's The Guardian." Of course he found himself fascinated by Ernesto Che Guevara – he loved the Stones, and Emotional Rescue was the first album he'd bought. "I hear of this guy and he's got a cool name. Che Guevara!" Del Toro as good as swoons when he says it. "Groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics!"

"So I went to a library and I was looking at books, and I came across a picture by René Burri of Che, smiling, in fatigues, I thought, 'Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!' "

Well, there you have it. What's next? Probably a YouTube featuring a weeping, wailing Benicio del Toro titled: "Leave Che Alone!"

Del Toro, who glorifies Che in a current movie, compared him (favorably) to Jesus Christ in an interview with Spain's El Pais, and to whom he dedicated his Cannes Film Festival "Best Actor" award, speaks for millions of Che groupies. "Che Guevara has given rise to a cult of almost religious hero worship among radical intellectuals and students across much of the Western world," proclaimed Time magazine in May 1968. "With his hippie hair and wispy revolutionary beard, Che is the perfect postmodern conduit to the nonconformist, seditious '60s."

"1968 actually began in 1967 with the murder of Che," recounts Christopher Hitchens. "His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model."

In a famous speech in 1961 Che Guevara denounced the very "spirit of rebellion" as "reprehensible." "Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates" commanded Guevara. "Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service."

And woe to those youths "who stayed up late at might and thus reported to work (government forced-labor) tardily." Youth, wrote Guevara, " should learn to think and act as a mass." "Those who chose their own path" (as in growing long hair and listening to Yankee-Imperialist Rock & Roll) were denounced as worthless "lumpen" and "delinquents." In his famous speech Che Guevara even vowed, "to make individualism disappear from Cuba! It is criminal to think of individuals!"

Tens of thousands of Cuban youths learned that Che Guevara's admonitions were more than idle bombast. In Che Guevara the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German STASI "consultants" who flooded Cuba in the early 60's, found an extremely eager acolyte. By the mid 60's the crime of a "rocker" lifestyle or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba's streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with "Work Will Make Men Out of You" in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today the world’s largest image of the man Benicio del Toro honors on screen and in multiple interviews, adorns Cuba’s headquarters for it's KGB-trained secret police, a gang of Communist sadists who jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin's own KGB and GRU.

"Rates," hardly tell the story however. Upon arriving in Havana on January of 1959 after an utterly bogus guerrilla war, Che Guevara immediately recognized the moat around Havana's La Cabana fortress as a handy-dandy execution pit. At Babi-Yar Hitler's SS had to dig one. Here Che Guevara had one ready made.

In 1961 a 20-year-old boy named Tony Chao Flores took his place at the execution stake, but he hobbled to it on crutches. He'd taken 17 bullets from their Czech machine guns when the Castroites captured him. On the way to the execution stake at the old Spanish fort turned to a prison and execution ground by Che Guevara, Tony was forced to hobble down some cobblestone stairs. Tony tumbled down the long row of steps and finally lay on the cobblestones at the bottom, writhing and grimacing. One of Tony's bullet-riddled legs had been amputated at the hospital, the other was gangrened and covered in pus. The Castroite guards cackled as they moved in to gag Tony with their tape.

Tony watched them approach while balling his good hand into a fist. Then as the first Red reached him BASH!! right across his eyes.

"I'll never understand how Tony survived that beating," says eyewitness former political prisoner Hiram Gonzalez who watched from his window in la Cabana prison. The crippled Tony was almost killed in the kicking, punching, gun-bashing melee but finally his captors stood off, panting and rubbing their scrapes and bruises. They'd managed to tape the battered boys mouth, but Tony pushed the guards away before they bound his hands. Their commander nodded, motioning for them to back off.

Now Tony started crawling towards the splintered and blood-spattered execution stake about 50 yards away, pushing and dragging himself with his hands as his stump of a leg left a trail of blood on the grass. As he neared the stake he'd stop and start pounding himself in the chest. His executioners seemed perplexed. The crippled boy was trying to say something. But his message was muzzled by the gag del Toro's idol made obligatory for his thousands of execution victims.

Tony's blazing eyes and grimace said enough. But no one could understand the boy's mumblings. Tony kept pushing himself, shutting his eyes tightly from the agony of the effort. His executioners shuffled nervously, raised their rifles, lowered them. They looked towards their commander who shrugged. Finally Tony reached up to his face and ripped off the tape Benicio del Toro's pin-up boy required for his condemned.

The 20 year-old freedom-fighter's voice boomed out. "Shoot me RIGHT HERE!" roared Tony at his gaping executioners. His voice thundered and his head bobbed with the effort. "Right in the CHEST!" Tony yelled. "Like a MAN!" Tony stopped and ripped open his shirt, pounding his chest and grimacing as his gallant executioners gaped and shuffled. "Right HERE!" he pounded.

On his last day alive, Tony had received a letter in jail from his mother. "My dear son," she counseled. "How often I'd warned you not to get involved in these things. But I knew my pleas were vain. You always demanded your freedom, Tony, even as a little boy. So I knew you'd never stand for communism. Well, Castro and Che finally caught you. Son, I love you with all my heart. My life is now shattered and will never be the same, but the only thing left now, Tony . . . is to die like a man."

"FUEGO!!" Che's lackey yelled the command and the bullets shattered Tony's crippled body, just as he'd reached the stake, lifted himself and stared resolutely at his murderers. But Che's firing squads usually murdered a hero who was standing. The legless Tony presented an awkward target. So some of the volley went wild and missed the youngster. Time for the coup de grâce.

Normally it's one .45 slug that shatters the skull. Eyewitnesses say Tony required . . . POW!-POW! . . . POW! – three. Seems the executioner's hands were shaking pretty badly. But they finally managed. The man Time magazine's hails among the "heroes and icons of the Century" had another notch in his gun. Another enemy dispatched – bound and gagged as usual.

Castro and Che were in their mid-30s when they murdered Tony. According to the authoritative Black Book of Communism their firing squads riddled another 14,000 bound and gagged freedom-fighters. Many (perhaps most) of their murder victims were boys in their late-teens and early 20s. Some were even younger.

Compare Tony's death to Guevara's capture: "Don't shoot!" whimpered the arch-assassin to his captors. "I'm Che! I'm worth more to you alive than dead!"

Then ask yourselves: whose face belongs on T-shirts worn by youth who fancy themselves, rebellious, freedom-loving and brave? Who deserves a Hollywood movie?

January 28, 2009

Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit his website.