Reeling

"Che" finally coming to a theater near you

Che, Steven Soderbergh's four-hour epic about the rise and fall of Che Guevara, has finally found a U.S. distributor. Despite the buzz around the film and its star Benicio Del Toro, who won the Best Actor prize for his performance as Guevara at last May's Cannes Film Festival, it wasn't until yesterday that IFC Films snapped up the North American distribution rights for the film.

Variety reports that Che will open in New York and Los Angeles for a one-week Oscar-qualifying run in December and will then expand to more cities (including Miami, hopefully) in January. It will also be available via IFC's video-on-demand service at the same time.

The fact that such a high-profile film ended up with such a tiny distributor implies the mixed response Che received at Cannes will translate to a tough sell at the box office. I suspect Del Toro's next picture, a remake of The Wolf Man, will be much more commercial. I mean, just look at that picture.

Meanwhile, Soderbergh has begun working on his next biopic - this one about the flamboyant pianist Liberace, with Michael Douglas in line to star.

"Burn After Reading" is a bumout comedy

Part of what made Joel and Ethan Coen the perfect filmmakers to adapt No Country For Old Men is that most of their movies - even their comedies - fall right in with Cormac McCarthy's bleak world view.

The Coens' latest, Burn After Reading, which I saw this morning, is a comedy and espionage-thriller spoof, with an occasionally lazy, sloppy script and a great goofball turn by Brad Pitt as a knuckle-headed gym instructor. But at heart, the movie is even more nihilistic and downbeat than No Country. The Coens have never felt this pessimistic or this dissatisfied with contemporary American life. The laughs in the film are all coated with arsenic.

Even the brothers' wise-ass nature, which has been a problem for me in some of their other pictures (especially O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I despised), feels different this time. Instead of whimsy or self-indulgence, the Coens' trademark bits of comic nonsense in Burn After Reading seem to be coming from a place of anger and despair. Maybe I'm projecting because I've been a little depressed lately, but Burn After Reading brought me down, man. I mean that as a compliment.