Che

G is for Guevara
A foreigner goes into the jungle, armed with a scant number of supplies and a skeleton crew of associates. He braves hostile terrain and emerges the victor. We might be describing Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the subject of Steven Soderbergh's megillah of a biopic, or we might be describing the filmmaker himself, who shot both halves of his two-part movie on his own dime and on the fly. As played by Benicio Del Toro, the Guevara of Che’s first half is part revolutionary and part rock star; then comes the second half, in which Bolivia stands in for Waterloo and Guevara officially becomes a martyr. Once again, the T-shirt icon and symbol of uprising is a flashpoint for two different mind-sets: those who dug Soderbergh’s chilly, process-fixated look at the Guevara’s war; and those who found this diptych to be off-putting, far too one-sided (where are the death squads, the labor camps, the debacle in the Congo?) and favoring head over heart to a fault. Which side are you on?

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