Ok, we hate these new French posters for Steven Soderbergh’s two-part epic, “Che” that have appeared over at FirstShowing. What the hell have the French done to Che Guevara/Benicio del Toro’s face?
These posters look really airbrushed and feel really cheesy and not in the tone of the movie at all. We hope the American distributor IFC is taking note of this. The old poster that was released months ago, was much more in the spirit of Soderbergh’s excellent and vastly underrated film (or at least underrated compared to some of the critics who feel it’s “dispassionate”; we say they’re missing the point).
It’s interesting to note, when we saw “Che” in two halves at the Toronto Film Festival, there was no mention of the film being called “The Argentine” and “Guerilla” and when we saw Soderbergh talk at the New York Film Festival, he didn’t mention either film by those names at all. We assumed those sobriquets were being ditched, but obviously these French posters are still sticking to those divided titles. Either way, yuck. We’re not with these posters at all, especially “The Argentine” one.
We didn’t realize that screenwriter Peter Buchman wrote both, “Jurassic Park III” and “Eragon” previously which is frightening as all get out, but he did a stellar job with “Che” (maybe those were paycheck jobs and his heart lied in something deeper because research on the film apparently went on for about seven years).
IFC Films is releasing “Che” and plans to debut the film in major cities (L.A., NY) as one picture in 2008 and then expand to further markets in early 2009 where it will probably be shown as two separate films. Don’t let either experience scare you off. The films are totally worth watching and they’ll definitely end up high on our Top 10 of 2008 list for sure.
