With Oscar season about to heat up, James Franco has written an article for Deadline in which he argues that his be-ping-pong-balled co-star, Andy Serkis, deserves the same consideration for wearing a wetsuit and jumping around like a monkey that other actors get for pretending that guys in wetsuits are actual monkeys. As I’ve said before, only through a team of men drawing another man acting like an ape who became a man were we able to discover what it means to be human.

…Narratively it was always his film: I play an emotionally stilted scientist who in the process of mistakenly unleashing a lethal virus on the human race, learns to care for others; Serkis gets to play Caesar, essentially Che Guevara in chimp form.

Che Guevara as a chimp? What an innovative idea, it’s almost as if they got it from a t-shirt…

Andy Serkis is the undisputed master of the newest kind of acting called “performance capture,” and it is time that Serkis gets credit for the innovative artist that he is…

…Audiences are used to large scale effects: impossible explosion, space travel, fantastic fairytale worlds, boys in tights swinging around New York, men with Squids for faces, but there is still a disconnection that happens when a character’s outer surface is rendered in a computer like Caesar’s was. We want to forget that there is a human underneath, the effects are so  well rendered we either forget that the spark of life in it’s eyes [sic] and the life in its limbs is informed by a breathing human or we are so drawn into the ontology of the character we can’t grasp its artistic origins or exactly how it was created. What this means is that we can enjoy such a character – enjoyment testified by the response to such films as Avatar, Return of the King, and Planet of the Apes – but we don’t give artistic credit where it is due.

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Steven Soderbergh made two movies about Che Guevara, The Guerillia and The Argentine.   They both star Benicio Del Toro and they’re both in Spanish.  They both screened together at Cannes under the title Che.  Today we have a brand new trailer for The Argentine, still without subtitles. I’m not sure what the strategy here is.  If you want people to care about something that’s in a different language, you need a presenter with huge cans or someone in a gorilla suit.  It’s just science.

[Picture source = RopeofSilicon - they also have a short clip with subtitles.]

One project that has really slipped under the radar is Steven Soderbergh’s two-movie take on Che Guevara – The Argentine and The Guerilla, both starring Benicio Del Toro (who’s right up there with Forrest Whitaker as Idi Amin and Morgan Freeman as Mandela in the annals of obvious casting). They don’t have a distributor yet, so the release date is still uncertain, but today, this bootleg trailer for The Argentine hit the web. It’s all in Spanish without subtitles, but it looks pretty good. The language of squinting is universal.

IESB had some brand new pics of Benicio Del Toro playing Che Guevara in Steven Sodaburg’s upcoming movies The Argentine and The Guerilla.   I’m not sure about this whole Famous-Person-As-Separate-People trend of biopics.  At least these are two separate movies – I tried to watch I’m Not There ("inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan") yesterday and it was like watching a guy smell his own farts for two hours.  Oh my God, you’re so innovative!  Can I award you the Oscar for smartest person in history?!

On a more positive note, Del Toro was born to play Che Guevara like Forrest Whitaker was born to play Idi Amin and Morgan Freeman was born to play Mandela.  Casting just doesn’t get easier than that. 

Also: I wish there was some way to turn Benicio Del Toro into a hologram projected next to my full length mirror.  That way I could get dressed and then look at the mirror and go, "So… how do I look?"  And the Benicio hologram could take a long drag of its cigarette, furrow its brow, then exhale and smile really slowly. "Berry good, my fraing.  Berry berry good," he’d say.  -Robo with the assist again