"He had a really warm smile."
The real Che
The ersatz Che, Del Toro
Posted on 05/25/2008 7:58:24 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
Benicio Del Toro, 'Latino Brad Pitt', wins Cannes award as 'Che'
by Claire Rosemberg Sun May 25, 3:59 PM ET
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 started his career on television before playing the youngest James Bond villain ever in "Licence To Kill".
One of his most recent star roles was in the much-noticed 2002 movie by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu "21 Grams" where he plays a former convict-turned-religious fanatic who kills two children and their father in a road accident.
Other major roles have been as a corrupt cop in "Sin City" by Robert Rodriguez in 2005, and as a drugged-out lawyer playing alongside Johnny Depp in Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", a 1998 movie about journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
Made by Marxists, with Marxist ‘’stars’’. You disagree? Please check the record, thanks.
Michael Cimino and Elaine May are Marxists? The Deer Hunter was Marxist with its sadistic Viet Cong? Nichols and May with their jokes about Psycho Analysis? Come Again?
I compare him to Hitler as a fellow totalitarian. Also, are you aware of the fact that Che wanted the Russians to launch a surprise nuclear attack on New York City? Would that have been mass murder enough for you to compare him to Hitler?
Why did the song “Feelings” start playing in my head upon reading your post....ROFL...bingo!! His smile made me feel so good....he must be a good man...these morons.
''Ishtar''. Beatty, starring. Paul Williams, songwriter. Please, MUST I go further? I shall, if you require it.
And Elaine May, former partner of the way left Mike Nichols, doesn't get a free pass here either.
Us female FReepers need pics to decide if he’s guilty or not!
(pinged najida because the comments of hers in the past have cracked me up)
Hell, he’s guilty, but is he sexy?
Che Guevara Planned Attacks Against the U.S.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
By: Humberto Fontova
Excerpt:
Thanks to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI the “walking of the walk” that Castro and Che had planned for those “hyenas” was uncovered in November of 1962. On Nov. 17 1962, J Edgar Hoovers’ FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term “terrorist” was not used at the time) by Cuban agents that targeted Macy’s Gimbel’s, Bloomindales and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. Che Guevara was the head of Cuba’s “Foreign Liberation Department” at the time.
A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2000 people, al-Qaida used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day.
Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children, actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children, were to be incinerated and entombed.
Hitler, eat your heart out, Castro must have beamed. Germany’s maximum leader had dreamed of pummeling New York as he pummeled London, but never came close. Despite the Luftwaffe’s designers and engineers best efforts, the “Amerika Bomber” remained a mere gleam in Hitler’s eye. His Yankee enemy’s homeland remained infuriatingly out of reach.
Till his last day in the bunker, Hitler could only pound his fist and make faces at his American enemies (and perhaps curse they day he flippantly declared war on a nation who’s public split 78/32 against going to war against him in a poll a mere month before that declaration. By the way: a U.S. poll from 1963 had almost the identical breakdown in favor of war with Castro!)
Castro and Che planned their Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled their plans for an even bigger one. “Say hello to my little friends!” they dreamt of yelling at the Yankee hyenas in October of 1962, right before the mushroom clouds. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest (Nikita Khrushchev) they might have pulled it off. “If the missiles had remained,” Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker in November 1962 regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, “We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York City.”
Some think Fidel and Che’s genocidal fantasy was a bigger factor in Khrushchev’s decision to yank the missiles than Kennedy’s so-called blockade.
Full article:
http://www.newsmax.com/fontova/che_guevara_u.s./2007/11/21/51310.html
And, yes, btw, Beatty's presence makes ANYTHING a Marxist project. You will recall, no doubt, Lenin's commentary on ''organised deception of the masses''.
Hitler was a leftist. But otherwise I agree.
Stalin? Mao? Just curious how they measure up?
Beatty became overt about his Marxist orientation when he became a big enough ''star'' to control plot and writing. I'll leave you to decide when that occurred exactly.
I see that we shall have to agree to disagree here. No problem w/me. Any problem w/you?
B&C merely replayed what was already a mythic archetype. You had the same story in the Hollywood of the 1930s (You Only Live Once) and in the 1940s (They Live By Night, Gun Crazy). It has more in common with Hollywood history obssesed French New Wave films like Breathless than depression-era agitprop. And as for his orienation later in his career...Beatty’s later projects (Dick Tracy, Bugsy, Love Affair, Bulworth, Town and Country) don’t bear out your thesis as they are mostly innocuous genre fluff. No problems at all. Just facts.
State socialism has, throughout its history, proven to be THE SINGLE most deadly thing that can happen to citizens of any given nation.
All of these guys were leftists, and whether they were national socialists or international socialists, they were socialists.
That Hitler and the NSDAP were socialist never has been in doubt -- see Hitler's speech to the Party conclave on 1 May 1927 (the date itself should tell us something, no?) -- but this clear and easily demonstrable fact has been suppressed, deliberately, by our Marxist-leaning media, beginning of course with the NY Slimes.
Not to bother mentioning, naturally, that the 'S' in NSDAP stood for 'socialist'. Too obvious for the media, no doubt (pardon my retching).
Thanks, I think I will catch a re-run of Red Dawn instead.
I see what the problem is, the article says that both of his parents were lawyers. The poor guy never had a chance.
Why are the sexy ones always so dumb?
"He had a really warm smile."
The real Che
The ersatz Che, Del Toro
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