The Circuit

The wise snuck candy into the Palais yesterday for the 4+ hours of Steven Soderbergh's "Che" but hunger wasn't the problem.

Water and sandwich bags were waiting at the intermission.  But at the end of the 15 minutes, lines for the toilets snaked down the stairs. 

The morning after a disastrous party -- packed, hot, off-site -- the blogs started rumbling, touched off by Todd McCarthy's review hitting blackberries and iPhones:

No doubt it will be back to the drawings board for “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic four-hour, 18-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara.

If the director has gone out of his way to avoid the usual Hollywood biopic conventions, he has also withheld any suggestion of why the charismatic doctor, fighter, diplomat, diarist and intellectual theorist became and remains such a legendary figure; if anything, Che seems diminished by the way he’s portrayed here.

Anne Thompson was there, too:

Soderbergh didn't think he could finish the film in time for Cannes. Why don't these guys ever learn? DON'T TAKE AN UNFINISHED MOVIE TO CANNES!!!! Wait. Give the film the time you need. The good news: there is plenty of fine material here to be edited into one releasable dramatic feature.

indieWIRE:

Soderbergh doesn't have a rabble-rousing bone in his body. "Che" benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity.

Cinematical:

Soderbergh serves as director, cinematographer and editor here, and the end result is masterful -- expressive, innovative, striking, exciting.

And commentators are still raging on an earlier post that "Che" was even made:

The utter folly of glorifying Che and the Castro Brother shows the complete blindness and stupidity of Western Liberal Elites. Ask any Cuban about this trio -- their savagery puts them in the bottom rung of hell.