“Che” star leaves in a snit after being reminded that Che was psycho
posted at 5:40 pm on January 27, 2009 by Allahpundit
Via the Standard, he’ll have you know that the Great Man didn’t just execute political prisoners willy nilly. He held trials, for god’s sake.
Well, sometimes.
“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.”…
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.”…
“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.”…
Mr. del Toro grew agitated when these prisons were described as “concentration camps,” a phrase that [Cuban dissident Armando] Valladares freely employs…
“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.”
The author, Sonny Bunch, already did the research; you’ll find it in the article, in the form of eyewitness testimony from Valladares and comments from Ron Radosh. My only criticism is that he lets Soderbergh off too easily: If it’s true that the director’s under no illusions about Guevara’s totalitarian impulses, why doesn’t that shine through in the film? Bunch makes it sound like a whitewash. Exit quotation: “Benicio del Toro is just one of the many accomplices of the Cuban tyranny.”










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If this movie is over 4 hours long, it makes me wonder how many movie theater owners would be willing to sacrifice two showings of a normal-length movie to show a long movie about Castro’s second-fiddle thug. Would they have to double their ticket prices for the Che movie to make up their losses?
Besides, Castro’s “revolution” has been going on for 50 years now, and a lot more Cuban “boat people” are trying to reach Florida than Americans trying to join Castro’s revolution. How many Americans are brainwashed enough to spend four hours watching a movie about a colossal failure?
I’d like to hear Senator Mel Martinez, a refugee from the Cuban revolution, speak about this movie…
This movie could be, and SHOULD be, a major flop, and maybe Senor del Toro is too bull-headed to realize it. Pun intended.
Steve Z on January 28, 2009 at 11:36 AM
OK. Maybe not. BUT-if the heads are empty, I imagine they would!
Badger40 on January 28, 2009 at 1:59 PM
Del Toro has officially marked himself a jackass.
To think “No Country for Old Men” is actually in my DVD rack.
No more of his movies.
Ryan Gandy on January 28, 2009 at 3:17 PM
Nutbags will be nutbags, it’s not as if Leftists know ANYTHING about history. Che was killed by our own C.I.A. and that’s a GOOD thing!
nelsonknows on January 28, 2009 at 5:14 PM
Ryan Gandy on January 28, 2009 at 3:17 PM
Dude, he was not in this movie. Sorry man. Keep the DVD
Now on to my 2 pennies:
It is funny how these tools try to make these folks deities only to get mad when they are questioned/confronted with this little thing called the truth.
Dis Is Ike,
Peace Out
jdsmith0021 on January 28, 2009 at 5:39 PM
Yes, Che did occassionally employ trials to convict his victims. Very often journalists found the verdict of trials posted before the trials began. In some cases a widow clad in black would take the witness stand and dramatically point out the accused and identify him as the wretched scum who killed her loved one. Then she would show up in the next trial and repeat her performance. And the next. And the next.
Che also ordered the lefty prosecution lawyers who looked for evidence to make their case to cease. Evidence was an artifact of decadent bourgeoisie society, Che roared. We execute from revolutionary necessity. He explained that the people can not be educated by good deeds but must be educated by the pedagogy of the firing squad.
Che enjoyed the firing squads, enough to have a wall knocked down at his prison so he could watch them from his office. He condemned 1892 men, boys, and women to death.
After watching many executions, he came to regret the spilling of so much blood. So he had the condemned stop on their way to their deaths to drain a few pints of blood from them. Some of the blood he sold to the North Vietnamese for $50 a pint.
Che was also instrumental in cracking down on crime, helping enforce a law that targeted behavior indicating a prediliction toward crime, an Orwellian concept. Some of these behaviors were long hair, blue jeans, and listening to American rock music. In other words, Che made war on hippies.
Che’s goons would make raids on known hangouts for such hippie types, often simply shooting them dead. Their bodies would then be presented to the funeral director and told they were in car accidents. Others were sent off to the Cuban gulag and worked to death.
It was so bad that Cuban kids who wanted to listen to rock and roll had to play it at night way down low, so that the neighborhood informer would not turn them in. They called it midnght music.
The greatest irony is that the kind of dopey hippie numbskull who loves Che the most is exactly the kind of person Che would have shot.
When Che executed his victims, he wouldn’t have the families informed until after they were buried. He wouldn’t tell them where the grave was, forbid them from searching the cemetery for it, and forbid them from grieving their death in their home.
Che was almost the Bin Laden of his time, plotting two separate attacks on New York City. One attack would blow up landmarks in New York. The other attack involved planting incendiary bombs in department stores around Manhattan on the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year. Both plots were discovered and defeated by the FBI and NYPD.
The irony of it all is that while Che was plotting to blow them up and burn them en masse, the elite of New York liberal society were entertaining and praising him in penthouse parties when he spoke at the UN. To them, Che was just the most radically chic of them all.
And those are the kind of Hollywood idiots who make movies praising Che.
Tantor on January 28, 2009 at 7:02 PM
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