Echoes of Flavio's Ghost Dreaming

Finally finished watching 'Che', the rather long movie in two parts by Binicio del Toro. For some reason it was a bit of an ordeal and it took me nearly a month to get through the whole five or six hours of it. Not because it is a bad film at all, maybe even because it is a good film -I found it painful to watch. And of course we all know the story. For me, though, it also stirs memories of things and beliefs  that changed many lives back home, back then, as well as the moral and political standpoint for many, including myself.

Maybe it was a bit painful because, although I don't share some of his political doctrines (and there is the shadow cast by his role in the 'Paredón', in the firing squad executions of many of the Batista regime prisoners in the beginning of the Cuban revolution), I still find admirable that somebody could  set out to give his life to better the lot of other people, misguided in so many ways as he may have been. 

The movie is very good although there were some annoying details -not major and probably not important, like the anacronism of some cars that did not exist in 1965, the wrong accents in speakers who were supposed to be Cuban or Bolivian and had very strong Espanish aczents, that sort of thing. I'm not sure it is a master-work but it is a very good movie, even if I had to watch it in small instalments....

One rather curious thing about the DVD: on this extra-long anti-capitalism anthem, you have to watch the ten minutes of commercial adverts or just, as I did, switch the audio off for the duration and do something else in the meantime.  You cannot skip or fast-forward them. And if you have to see the movie in instalments as I did, this will happen every single time you start the disc again.

Had never seen the film until tonight. To say that it is 'loosely' based on Asimov's work doesn't even begin to touch it. Remotely inspired doesn't even get there either. There's just a couple of names from the books and a couple of quotes of the Three Laws and that's it. And that wilting lily is Asimov's Dr Susan Calvin? No way....