I didn’t see Che. Last night was the first night since I’ve been here that I had an opportunity to go to bed at a reasonable hour and, after a week of dozing off in screenings on three hours of fitful sleep, I took it. Regrets? Reading the recaps and reviews, I have a few. I mean, if Anne Thompson is right, the Cannes cut will, like the Cannes cut of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, never again see the light of day. Comparing Che to that film and others which were brought to Cannes straight out of the oven and half-raw, she blogs:
The good news: there is plenty of fine material here to be edited into one releasable long dramatic feature…One thing is likely: it will not be released as it was seen here. And it will not sell overnight–unless a distrib promises to help Soderbergh to find his movie. It seems that Peter Rice of Fox Searchlight, Daniel Battsek of Miramax and James Schamus of Focus knew that they didn’t need to see the movie before they left town.
David Poland has no love for any blogger or journalist who “felt compelled to offer their opinions way too early,” thus increasing the chances that “Soderbergh cuts the film under Cannes pressure - even though there is no consistent correlation between Cannes response and US release success.” But David was in L.A. He didn’t have the experience of being placated with a perfunctory sack lunch in between Che chunks; he didn’t wait for an after party shuttle that never arrived. He’s suggesting from afar that critics actually take a day to sort out how the external factors surrounding the screening made the feel from what they think about what was on the screen.
It’s a nice thought, and maybe in a perfect world or another time, but at Cannes in 2008, where no one’s buying anything but IFC and the stuff they’ve bought would be unreleasable for a different studio (I love Summer Hours, Un Conte de Noel and The Pleasure of Being Robbed, but these are not highly commercial films), 100,000 people have spent the better part of two weeks waiting for a breakthrough. They didn’t get it, and unless Synecdoche, New York turns out a lot better than early word would suggest, they’re not going to get it. People are tired, and just submitting to the Che experience was apparently quite an ordeal. This is an emotional situation, and the reaction came loud and it came quickly. Maybe that’s not how it should be. But it is what it is.
In related news, Benicio Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh are about to do a photo call and press conference. I’ll post what I can before I have to run off to wait in line for the Quentin Tarantino presentation.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth