Che (2008)

I don't know how much Steven Soderbergh re-edited his two films about Che since I saw them last May at Cannes, but they felt a good deal different to me as I watched them again earlier tonight. I find myself now at odds with my initial thoughts about the films, where I preferred Che: Part One (a "complex blend of time periods and visual styles that feels the most fully formed") to Part Two ("almost stridently undramatic, a series of sad things happening without warning or context to a bunch of people we don't know very much about"). Though Part Two, also known as Guerilla, remains an unconventionally bleak picture, its far more coherent and far more well-shot than I'd previously given it credit for.

Still, these are not easy films to digest or to enjoy, particularly since they're intended to be viewed in one gargantuan 250-plus minute sit that includes very few moments that audiences accustomed to traditional Hollywood biopics have come to expect. They seem engineered to antagonize audiences: Soderbergh has said that he tried "to find the scenes that would happen before or after the scene that you would typically see in a movie like this," in order to defy the viewer's expectations and he succeeds. Part One charts the incremental progress of the Cuban Revolution, builds to the strategic triumph of the Battle of Santa Clara and then abruptly ends just before Che's forces arrive in Havana. In the final scene, Che pulls over some joyriding troops who've celebrated their victory by boosting a cherry-red Chevy and sends them back to Santa Clara. The soldiers don't get to reap the spoils of the war, and neither does the audience for having sat through it. Instead, they're invited to undertake another two hours of guerilla warfare minutia -- building camps, preparing food, attacking your enemies -- and this time there isn't even a happy ending. Where most would have asked why -- why Che join Castro, why he left Cuba for Bolivia, why his second campaign failed as spectacularly as the first succeeded -- Soderbergh only asks how.

Especially on first viewing, Guerilla is frustrating; but then, the picture is fundamentally about frustration. Guevara goes to Bolivia and attempts to do the things he did in Cuba there, but finds all his battle-tested tactics outdated and unsuccessful. Though he refuses to admit it to his dwindling forces, the walls are closing in, and the frame literally does the same; Soderbergh shot Part Two in 1:85 compared to the Cinemascope dimensions of Part One. All the colors of the first part, the lush greens of the Cuban jungle, are washed out of the second. Panoramic crane shots are replaced by bumpy hand-held camerawork (most of it by Soderbergh himself). The cumulative effects of scene after scene of Guevara's forces getting surprised by government troops and fleeing with heavy casualties takes a wearing toll on the audience. Why does Soderbergh repeat himself? Why doesn't he cut in another narrative to leaven the tedium, as he does during Part One? The reason, I suspect, is to have us empathize with Guevara's own refusal to deviate from his path, to give us a small taste of how it felt to walk in the man's shoes during those final days.

A critic of Soderbergh could argue that he makes only two kinds of movies: self-consciously cool ones (Out of Sight, The Limey, the Ocean's series) and self-consciously cold ones (Solaris, The Good German) and Che, which is certainly the latter, does not provide a counter-argument. And yet there is something here, and on that second viewing I felt that even more strongly than the first, where I largely admired Soderbergh's gumption and rejected the execution. By focusing on the day-to-day process of revolution, Soderbergh has revealed the human being beneath the t-shirt icon, despite the fact that he barely interrogates Guevara's character. Regardless of what you think of what he did - regardless, even of what he thought about what he did - Che Guevara was a person whose small, individual actions had enormous cumulative consequences. Soderbergh's Che says here is a man. He did something incredible. And here is how he did it.

The Hot Rock (1972)

A gem about a gem, The Hot Rock is the sort of film that inspired Steven Soderbergh to make a bunch of movies about funny, likable, slightly inept thieves. I know this because the internet told me so, but it was pretty obvious while I was watching this movie, which I had never heard of before and watched on a complete lark because it co-starred George Segal and it was from a period (the early to mid 1970s) when, in my opinion, George Segal was the balls.

I absolutely loved this movie, and that is probably due, in part, to the fact that I'd never heard of the picture and didn't have high expectations for it and it also starred Robert Redford who I always think I'm going to hate in every movie he's in. Of course, then he charms me in every movie he's in and I remember that's why he's one of the biggest movie stars of the last half-century: specifically because he can charm everyone into liking him. Likable bastard, making me like him. Why can't he play a leper or a guy who eats puppies?

So The Hot Rock is one of the two films Soderbergh watched as research for the Ocean's pictures (The other, awesomely enough, is Ghostbusters. Soderbergh is so cool he hurts me and my lameness). He pretty much borrows everything, from the milieau of location-heavy comedic heists to the camraderie of the thieves, and what he didn't use for Ocean's Eleven he took for Twelve which is arguably even more Hot Rockian in its construction. I love both Ocean's, but The Hot Rock is maybe a little better, a little funnier, a little more satisfying, a little more organic, and I would guess that Soderbergh, cool as he is, would agree with me.

Redford plays John Dortmunder, freshly released from prison (just as Danny Ocean is at the start of Eleven) and ready to score. He's picked up from prison by his brother-in-law Andrew (Segal), who was part of the reason Dortmunder was in the clink in the first place. He doesn't want to trust Andrew but he really can't resist, especially when Andrew's got a honey of an assignment picked out: an African ambassador to the United Nations (Moses Gunn, giving both regal and sinister with equal aplomb) wants a rare gem that's being displayed in the Brooklyn Museum. He could go through diplomatic channels but he's pretty sure that won't work and even if it did, it takes too long, so he hires Arthur and Dortmunder to steal it.

Without ruining too much, the heist is relatively early in the film and it goes both well and poorly; they steal the gem but they lose it too, so they've got to recover it, which means another heist, and so on. The movie is full of inventive schemes; and, really, inventive schemes are the best parts of heist movies. You present an impossible objective and you watch your heroes figure out a way to make the impossible possible. It's the best part, except most heist movies have one good scheme; this one has like six. I'm not a math guy, but I think that, mathematically, that makes The Hot Rock six times better than every other heist movie ever made.

Call me biased, but I'm sorry; I simply cannot not love any movie that involve priceless human excrement, guys climbing walls with ropes like the Adam West Batman TV show, and Zero Mostel playing a shyster. Here he's the lawyer to one of Redford's gang, and Zero, in full-on Max Bialystock mode, steals every damn scene. Has any human ever played despicable as lovably as Zero? He was like the Hulk of lovable assholes: the jerkier Zero get, the more likable Zero get!

Along with The Hot Rock, my favorite Redford picture is The Sting. What is it about the guy that makes him so good at playing desperate con men? He's like an adonis — his hair is so perfectly tossled in The Hot Rock it looks like he just stepped out of a shampoo commercial — so why does he play scumbags so well? And Segal; well I've already established that Segal is the balls, but here's a great example. He has almost no jokes in the movie, but everything he says and does is funny. He plays a similar character to the one I love from California Split: both are sort of losers who put up good fronts, he doesn't let you see their desperation but you can sense it behind their laugh and their cool-dude sunglasses. I also want to point out the other two members of the gang, Ron Leibman and Paul Sand, who aren't big stars (I didn't know either one until I looked them up on IMDb and realized I'd seen them each in a bunch of stuff) but who hold their own with Redford and Segal wonderfully. Leibman is the wheelman who proclaims he can drive anything and then gets that boast put to the test when the boys shove him behind the stick of a helicopter. Sand is the explosives expert and the best impressionist and actor in the group and he has several memorable transformations.

In a better world, The Hot Rock would be revered and it signature catch phrase, "Afghanistan bananastan!" would be known the world over. But this is not that world. In this world, you've got to DVR it when it plays AMC at 6 in the morning. I advise you to do the same. Ocean's Thirteen's coming out this summer and you need to know where Soderbergh's stealing all his tricks from in advance.