motorcycle diaries
'The Motorcycle Diaries is lovely to look at but insipid, a lavishly illustrated Rough Guide to white liberal self-affirmation. When Ernesto, weakened by frequent, harrowing asthma attacks, struggles to swim across the Amazon to spend his 24th birthday with patients at the San Pablo leper colony, the act crystallizes Salles's film: a well-meaning but ostentatious display of solidarity with a vaguely defined ideal, not entirely unlike making the scene in your Che Guevara tank top."
"At artful moments, the action pauses for portraits—not stills but wavering poses—of the people, mostly impoverished, whom Ernesto meets along the way. These are in black-and-white, and we are meant to imagine them burning, like photographic exposures, into the Guevara conscience. Are movies the best place for such edification? I know of only a handful of films that can begin to match the sober eye of Walker Evans, say, or Dorothea Lange, and the insertion of documentary rigor into something as ravishing as “The Motorcycle Diaries” smacks, I fear, of the picturesque."
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- bill 9-23-2004 6:07 pm
'The Motorcycle Diaries is lovely to look at but insipid, a lavishly illustrated Rough Guide to white liberal self-affirmation. When Ernesto, weakened by frequent, harrowing asthma attacks, struggles to swim across the Amazon to spend his 24th birthday with patients at the San Pablo leper colony, the act crystallizes Salles's film: a well-meaning but ostentatious display of solidarity with a vaguely defined ideal, not entirely unlike making the scene in your Che Guevara tank top."
- bill 9-23-2004 6:18 pm [add a comment]
"At artful moments, the action pauses for portraits—not stills but wavering poses—of the people, mostly impoverished, whom Ernesto meets along the way. These are in black-and-white, and we are meant to imagine them burning, like photographic exposures, into the Guevara conscience. Are movies the best place for such edification? I know of only a handful of films that can begin to match the sober eye of Walker Evans, say, or Dorothea Lange, and the insertion of documentary rigor into something as ravishing as “The Motorcycle Diaries” smacks, I fear, of the picturesque."
- bill 9-27-2004 12:03 am [add a comment]