Just thought I’d let you know it’s available as a new release at blockbusters. Fabulous travel flick.
See the movie. It demonstrates quite poignantly how the poor and at least one young intellectual could have become communist in that time and place. The land owners and corporations pretty much guaranteed it.
On second thought those sentiments might be entirely lost on anyone so insensitive as to post a vile photograph like that. Forget The Motorcycle Diaries. Maybe you can rent a Nascar Highlights video or something instead.
[quote=“bob”]See the movie. It demonstrates quite poignantly the how the poor and one young intellectual could have become communist in that time and place. The land owners and corporations pretty much guaranteed it.
On second thought those sentiments might be entirely lost on anyone so insensitive as to post a vile photograph like that. Forget The Motorcycle Diaries. Maybe you can rent a Nascar Highlights video or something instead.[/quote]
As much as I loathe American car racing, along with most of the rest of modern American culture (save for sweet, sweet basketball), and don’t get me wrong–southern culture as typified by the Nascar scene is really and truly vomitous–I would argue that Nascar is emblematic of most everything right in the world, and young communist intellectuals in the 1950s symptomatic of most everything wrong.
It’s a contradiction I have trouble with, but that’s because at heart I’m an elitist intellectual bastard myself. If a society is free enough that the vulgar masses want to watch shite, then let’em watch shite.
Better that than enslave them, which is what Che did.
I can’t live with that, although I suppose I’ll have to learn. All that wasted energy, talent, time, money… Something like 25% of the economy revolves around the insipid automobile already. Does any more need to be wasted?
You got me there. Not only is North American car culture big, dumb and stupid in comparison with Europe, where the cool cars come from, it’s harmful to people (obesity) and the environment (suburbs filled with McMansions gobbling up resources).
Randomly turning the channel at commercials during the Heat-Pistons game tonight I happened upon an American show about people moving house from Houston to Florida. They were a couple about 30 working in management of some type. They had a big suburban house in Houston. They each drove their own cars. They were fat. Their bland sense of entitlement made me want to hurl. I can understand why people in other countries would want to blow them up, quite frankly.
Problem is, the nutbars want to blow them up in order to establish their “umma,” a bleak alternative. So as much as I despise North American car culture and American pop culture and suburban shite, intellectually I find it to be the purest expression of freedom going.
Topic for another thread: Having established that proposition in my last sentence above, how do you wean North Americans off of the automobile before the devastation worsens? Without fascism, I mean?
Shrug.
I started watching it a few days ago but fell asleep halfway through. Nice old Norton though – wonder if any are still around.
I’ve got to agree with Bob… that picture posted above is poor form… a cheap and callous insult to a truly great man…
haven’t seen the movie, but anyone even vaugely interested should read “The Bolivian Diary”… It’s Che Guevara’s personal diary detailing his final heroic struggle in the jungles of Bolivia…
This was my favourite movie for 2004. Amazing photography…
[quote=“plasmatron”]I’ve got to agree with Bob… that picture posted above is poor form… a cheap and callous insult to a truly great man…
[/quote]
Erm…didn’t you get the memo?
The Cult of Che: Knowing what we know, why do we still celebrate him?
The Cult of Che: Don’t applaud The Motorcycle Diaries
This is obviously turning political, but of all the things Che was, he was not a “truly great man” by a longshot.
[quote=“porcelainprincess”] So as much as I despise North American car culture and American pop culture and suburban shite, intellectually I find it to be the purest expression of freedom going.
Topic for another thread: Having established that proposition in my last sentence above, how do you wean North Americans off of the automobile before the devastation worsens? Without fascism, I mean? [/quote]
I think the same way that you wean them off cigarettes. By pointing out that city space in particular is shared space and the personal automobile takes up too much of it and stinks up too much of it. Enough pussy footing around. I feel like a scrap.
That was perhaps the most biased movie review I have ever read. The movie didn’t even hint at the violence Che would one day be capable of and that is perhaps it’s only failing. Other than that it was an extrordinary travel film and an inteligent look at the conditions that breed communism. It was also exquisitely well acted especially by those in secondary roles, the river boat prostitute, the mechanic’s wife, the lepers… absolutely touching. Such a treat from the banal nonsense that we so often see made by the big producers. Apparently that reviewer missed those things. Either that or he wasn’t even looking for them.
That was perhaps the most biased movie review I have ever read. The movie didn’t even hint at the violence Che would one day be capable of and that is perhaps it’s only failing. Other than that it was an extrordinary travel film and an inteligent look at the conditions that breed communism. It was also exquisitely well acted especially by those in secondary roles, the river boat prostitute, the mechanic’s wife, the lepers… absolutely touching. Such a treat from the banal nonsense that we so often see made by the big producers. Apparently that reviewer missed those things. Either that or he wasn’t even looking for them.[/quote]
I think you’re missing the point. A sensitive portrayal of one of history’s monsters that not only avoids the unpleasant fact of the misery he helped cause (erm…ever heard of communism? ever heard of the fact that he worshipped Stalin? Stalin was a communist tyrant who killed, what, 20 million people? 30 million?), but is naked hagiography, is a fraud.
One can understand the conditions that “breed communism” just as one can understand the conditions that “breed fascism.” No, the two tyrannies are not exactly the same, though they clearly have a moral and ethical equivalence. While the 1950s intellectuals didn’t like the rich, and didn’t like the way the poor were exploited, ya gotta remember what they were proposing. It was fucking communism, fer crissakes! Remember how bad communism was?
Oh, wait, it still exists in Cuba and North Korea. You know how bad communism is? And people should go see a film about Che Guevara that cloyingly asks viewers to be sympathetic to what the man did in the late 1950s and through the 1960s?
Fine. How about a sympathetic portrayal of Hitler’s student years, then?
If as a young art student hitler was the sensitive, inteligent type then a movie like that would be a good idea.
Don’t forget that the conditions that breed communism still exist. Do you remember the boat scene where the poor people are being are being towed along in the barge behind the main boat and Che is looking at them wondering “Why are you there and I am here? Am I actually any better than you?” Don’t tell me you have never felt like that.
By the way when I said I felt like a scrap I didn’t mean with you. I thought we were pretty much commrades at least on the auto issue at least.
[quote=“plasmatron”]I’ve got to agree with Bob… that picture posted above is poor form… a cheap and callous insult to a truly great man…
haven’t seen the movie, but anyone even vaugely interested should read “The Bolivian Diary”… It’s Che Guevara’s personal diary detailing his final heroic struggle in the jungles of Bolivia…[/quote]Please tell me I’m missing the irony in the post Plasma.
The picture is funny. Che’ was a murdering POS.
Anything else is PC revisionist crapola.
Otherwise I greatly appreciate your informative posts in the Vroom Vroom section! (no sarcasm, this time I’m being honest with you)
Tainan cowboy you are a funny guy and that “would” be a funny picture if it was a sleeping Che. Unfortunately it’s not. Some people think death is deserving of a little dignity no matter whose it is.
Or fortunately. About the only good thing about Che is that he was killed young, thereby no doubt sparing the lives of countless others. A murdering bastard is a murdering bastard, no matter how much of a starry-eyed idealist he is.
Bullocks.
That may be true but there were and still are a lot of people around whose business enterprises and influence over government policies pretty much force millions of people even deeper into poverty. That’s some of the worst violence you can do to a person. It should come as no suprise that the victims of such violence, and the people who sympathize with them, become capable of some violence of their own. Perhaps the real intention of this film is to remind us of these sad facts.
i think its bollocks to dismiss this movie just because che supported stalin…he was an important political figure and it is always meaningful to look at the background of political figures be they gandhi, mao, stalin, hitler, churchill…whoever…in any case this is a fantastic travel movie with very valid comment on the terrible conditions faced by the working classes in south america…it doesn’t negate the movie just because che turned in to a totalitarian in later life any more than wagner’s music becomes unlistenable because he was a proto-nazi or “off the wall” was made by a child molesting freakoid…