An evening with Che Guevara and Steven Soderbergh

Silly me, I didn't have dinner first. 

I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago about how Portland is not the center of the universe. That's fine, I guess. He tends to be a bit of a wanderer. He's got a bunch of stamps in his passport, but he always ends up back here. 

I like the idea of travel. But my sort of travel is born of working in hotels for a decade. I like clean sheets and upgraded rental cars. I like a morning paper to be delivered to me each day. I like working elevators and toilet paper that doesn't give you splinters.

Most of the time, I'd just rather be here. I like Portland, center of the universe or not.

Where else can you see Soderbergh's epic Che in its entirety with the director there to take questions afterward?

The answer? Probably not anywhere else in North America. At least not anytime soon.

The "Roadshow Version" of Che runs just short of four and a half hours. With the intermission built in and the director's Q&A following, it was about a six hour commitment. 

Honestly, I am incredibly glad I went. I know virtually nothing about Cuban history other than the relations between Cuba and the US make it illegal for me to travel there. I know Che as the guy on the artsy kids' t-shirts. I know Fidel Castro as a tyrant and a Communist.

Admittedly, only parts of Che's story are told in the movie. "We could have taken it to HBO, presented it as a 10-hour miniseries and made a lot more money," Soderbergh told his audience afterward.  

It's been released in Japan as two separate films and has done "really well" according to Soderbergh. Part  one follows Che's travel from Mexico City into the jungles of Cuba, leading rebel fighters over mountains and through rivers. It ends earlier than I expected, not with their arrival in Habana but two hundred miles from there when they hear of the flight of Batiste. Part two follows Che in his failed campaign in Bolivia nine years later. 

But what was the most important thing I cam away with?

Benicio del Toro, who plays the title character, is a producer on the film. In pre-production for nearly a decade, neither he nor Soderbergh were sure it would ever get done. "The only thing worse than doing it and fucking it up", Soderbergh told him,"would be to not do it at all."

A lesson to us all.