Now Soderbergh has constructed a high-profile action picture around Mixed Martial Arts icon Gina Carano, a woman alarmingly skilled in the ways of head-kicking, gut-punching, throat-wringing and related modes of cage-match devastation. Unlike Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, and other movie-land action chicks of the past, Carano demonstrates beyond doubt that if called upon, she actually could put you in the hospital.

“Haywire” is an old-school spy-versus-spy espionage tale. It would be nice if the story (scripted by Lem Dobbs, who previously wrote Soderbergh’s Kafka and The Limey) made a little more sense; at some points you might wish it made any sense at all. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a black-ops specialist in the employ of an international security firm run by her shifty onetime boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor).

When a shadowy figure named Coblenz (Michael Douglas) commissions Mallory’s services in extracting a Chinese journalist from bad-guy captivity in Barcelona, Kenneth dispatches her there with a team that includes the prickly hunk Aaron (Channing Tatum); she’s also told to coordinate with an ambiguous local character named Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas). The operation is a suitably tense undertaking, crowned by a back-alley smackdown in which Mallory, in an explosion of leg-sweeps and gob-smashes, reduces an oppo gunman to twitching insensibility. This is pretty great to watch, let me tell you.

Read the rest of the review at Reason.com

So, where are the thrills, the chases and the heart-stopping revelations that usually accompany this doomsday scenario? And why can’t Soderbergh, an Oscar winner himself for the 2000 film “Traffic,” find the screen time to showcase all the Oscar nominees – and winners – in his cast?

The sound of a person coughing opens the film, and one of the first objects seen is a small bowl of bar nuts. Already, we’re dreading the kind of viral calamity about to strike courtesy of these small, deft strokes.

A married woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) arrives home from a business trip with a nasty cold, and before long she’s sprawled out on her kitchen floor, unconscious. Her husband (Matt Damon) rushes her to the hospital, but she never regains consciousness.

Did Soderbergh just kill off Chris Martin’s better half? (no spoiler here – we learn this in the film’s trailer).

From there, we get glimpses of how the virus which struck her down spreads. We see foreign cities with their population numbers emblazoned on the screen to highlight the stakes. We meet dedicated researchers (Kate Winslet, Elliott Gould), a compassionate Centers for Disease Control rep (Laurence Fishburne) and an aggressive blogger (Jude Law) who sees conspiracies all around him.

Every element a ripped from the headlines yarn demands is lined up for our approval, and for a while “Contagion” infects us to the core. But it’s s a thriller with few thrills, an impeccably acted disaster movie without the heart to go for broke. The movie hints at broad conspiracies, and then backs away from such accusations. For every villain there’s a hero following closely behind. It doesn’t condemn any quadrant of society but merely hints at the flaws in each. It’s dispassionate when it should be showing the fire in its storytelling belly.

It’s as if radio’s Fairness Doctrine were alive, well and applicable to feature films.

Winslet makes the most of her character’s muted story arc, while Fishburne summons every ounce of gravitas to play a man caught between personal and professional duties. Law is the live wire here, a muckraker out to spread the news that Big Pharma is up to its old tricks.

Marion Cotillard appears briefly in a subplot that adds nothing but confusion to the narrative.

It’s fascinating to see Soderbergh’s vision of societal chaos, and casting big stars to enliven small roles does make the subsequent epiphanies more profound. The filmmakers reveal just scientific jargon to keep the story’s structure sound, although a few whoppers rattle that foundation.

A-list directors rarely tackle material as pulpy as “Contagion.” And, after seeing Soderbergh’s approach to an epidemic epic, maybe we know why. Sometimes, a disaster movie should skip the nuance and just tell a darn good story.

The Blu-ray extras will do nothing to make you sleep any easier after considering the real-life implications of the film.”The ‘Contagion’ Detectives” talks to some of the experts who helped make the film as realistic as possible.

“They’re trained not to panic,” notes Cotillard of the men and women trying to keep our population safe behind the scenes.

“The Reality of ‘Contagion’” is a standard, albeit dense look at the film’s creation.

“It’s a matter of when, not if,” says Law regarding what the contagion experts told the crew about the possibility of a global pandemic like the one shown in the film.

Perahps the most innovative extra is “Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World,” an animated look at how something spreads so rapidly through our modern society. It’s goofy and fast paced, a darkly comic riff on a worst-case scenario that even mentions Bieber Fever to lighten the mood. The segment wraps with some proactive steps we can take to prevent a real-life “Contagion,” starting with the simple act of washig our hands regularly.

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“Contagion” begins on day two of the outbreak, where we see several people in cities across the globe fighting a mysterious disease that first comes across as the common cold or flu. The colossal cast illustrates how several health organizations around the world respond to the deadly virus, spreading just as quickly as the panic. From a sickly Minnesota wife (Gwyneth Paltrow) and her outraged husband (Matt Damon), the epidemic spreads to cities like Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, London, and Tokyo, which shows just how fast this virus could potentially wipe out the whole planet. The team consists of a CDC administrator (Laurence Fishburne), a scientist (Jennifer Ehle), a doctor (Elliot Gould), a researcher (Katie Winslet), and a military man (Bryan Cranston) who must all work together to keep the virus contained and to find a cure. The World Health Organization sends an epidemiologist (Marion Cotillard) to Hong Kong in hopes of figuring out where the source started. While all these higher ops are trying to figure out this ever-spreading problem, citizens must hide in their homes and fend for their lives.

Another addition to the cast is scum blogger Alan (Jude Law), who brings two distractions to the mix: that weird, yucky front tooth and the fact that he could have possibly found a cure to this viral mess. A favorite part in the film is when Alan tries to get his friend who writes for a San Francisco paper to publish his article and when she refuses, he walks out screaming, “Print media is dying!”

The film piggybacks the recent hysteria of the H1N1, also known as “swine flu.”  In this film, people cover their faces with masks, wear gloves, and wait in long lines to get vaccines, food, and other necessary items.  When these ends cannot be met, riots ensue and cities and towns are abandoned.

“Contagion” is fast-paced, mind-boggling, and eerie. Many of those emotions develop from its thrilling score composed by Cliff Martinez, who partnered with Soderbergh in other films like “Traffic” and “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” Where the movie fails is making the audience truly care about the characters and their safety. A little more character development and reducing the size of the cast would have made this a thriller one worth purchasing on Blu-ray.

Overall, “Contagion” is a smart and fascinating thriller that could use a little more humanity.

Near the beginning of the story, a mother named Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from a trip to Hong Kong and becomes sick in Minneapolis. Her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) isn’t concerned at first but when her condition begins to rapidly deteriorate, he brings her to the hospital. Soon afterwards, Mitch find out that Beth has died and learns that his son is infected as well. While Mitch seems to be immune to the virus, he watches firsthand as his family falls victim to it.

“Contagion” soon introduces a large group of characters who will be affected, either directly or indirectly, by the virus. Laurence Fishburne plays Dr. Ellis Cheever, the Deputy Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is hired to create a cure for the virus.  The doctor sends Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) to Minneapolis to investigate the roots of the rapidly-spreading sickness. In the meantime, conspiracy theorist Alan Krumlede (Jude Law) becomes obsessed with the virus after watching an online video of a man infected with it. Krumlede starts spreading rumors online about pharmaceutical companies working with the government in a grand scheme to help the companies earn a massive profit. The film’s cast is huge and also includes Marion Cotillard, Bryan Cranston, Elliott Gould, and John Hawkes.

Unfortunately, few of these characters are well-developed. With such a large cast, it feels like the script was more focused on the virus than the characters who are affected by it. When some of these characters eventually become infected, it’s difficult to care about them. With a smaller cast, this story could have worked a lot better because the filmmakers would have been able to better develop the characters early on. Instead, we’re introduced to characters who die off before we even care about them.

Halfway through, the story also takes a dramatic turn when it starts focusing more on Alan’s theories. The first half of the film is strong as it shows the virus spreading and the work being done to stop it.  In the second half, though, Alan seems to become a main focus of the story. His ideas feel like the rantings of a conspiracy theorist and slow down the pace of this otherwise interesting story.

“Contagion” starts with a simple idea: a deadly virus is spreading uncontrollably.   But then overwhelms it with too many characters and a bizarre side plot about government conspiracies. If it had focused on the medical community’s reaction to the virus and the spread of the disease itself, the story could have worked a lot better.

Director Steven Soderbergh knows how to make movies with a wide range of characters and he showed off that ability in films like “Ocean’s 11” and “Traffic.” However, the screenplay written by Scott Z. Burns does Soderbergh no favors. If the characters aren’t well-crafted in a story like this, the film doesn’t work as it should and that is the ailment that infects “Contagion.”

MANY THANKS TO OUR 9/11 CONTRIBUTORS

As always, Big Hollywood’s contributors came through in a big way. We can’t thank those who contributed to yesterday’s series of posts commemorating the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity enough. In fact, we received so many excellent pieces that we decided to extend the series into this week rather than pile them all into a single day.

So stay tuned for more.

ANALYSIS: WEEKEND BOX OFFICE

#1. Contagion $23.1 Million Opening

On almost 4000 screens with an Oscar-winning director and four Oscar winners in the cast (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, and Kate Winslet), “Contagion” was only able to scrounge up $23 million.  With a $60 million budget (which doesn’t include advertising costs), director Steven  Soderbergh’s star-studded thriller will have to gross somewhere around $150 million just to break even

Now can we declare the movie star dead?

And when will Hollywood wake up and realize that Matt Damon insulting half the country on a regular basis effectively destroys the most important quality a movie star can acquire: audience goodwill.

#2. The Help $8.6 Million, Total Domestic $137 Million

This $25 million adult drama with no “sure-fire” bankable stars has thus far grossed a whopping $137 million.

This not only proves that a good story that’s well executed and acted can find an audience, but also how hungry people are for this kind of theatre experience.

#3 Warrior $5.6 Million Opening

Though I’ve heard nothing but great things about the film itself, there just isn’t a wide enough audience for mixed martial arts. Personally, I thought the trailer was terrific, but people probably thought they’d seen the story a hundred times before.

I suspect there’s life in this one yet. Between the positive reviews and what’s sure to be positive word-of-mouth, this has the makings of a DVD hit — the kind that can generate a sequel.

Furthermore, Hollywood loves a comeback and come Oscar season “Warrior” could benefit from the hoopla surrounding Nick Nolte’s performance.

#4 The Debt $4.9 Million, Total Domestic $22 Million

This $20 million drama has already brought in $24 million worldwide. Obviously, that’s not much in comparison to “The Help,” but profit is profit and this one will surely do well enough to do better than break even. And again you have another well-reviewed adult drama bringing in a sizable audience.

For years we heard how the adult drama was dead. No, the lousy, depressing, nihilistic adult drama was dead.

There’s a difference.

Another Woody Allen Documentary?

Whatever you might think of Woody Allen as a person (and I don’t think much), he is an undeniably fascinating character. But it’s only been 14 years since “Wild Man Blues” was released in 1997 and it’s hard to see how that can be improved upon. Moreover, other than his recent comeback, nothing new or seismic has happened in the man’s life.

If you haven’t seen it, “Wild Man Blues” does a marvelous job of showing us the side of Woody Allen Woody Allen doesn’t want you to see. Posing as a documentary about Allen’s love of music and using only subtext to dig into his psychology, Allen cooperated and revealed much about himself and his family — all of it a few years after his bitter break up with Mia Farrow and his subsequent marriage to Soon-Yi.

There’s really not much left to tell and certainly no better way to tell it. And if it’s nothing more than a career retrospective, Turner Classic movies can do that.

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LAST NIGHT’S SCREENING

Down to the final two episodes of “Damages” Season Two. This is perfect escapist television after a long work day. Triple-A trash, and I say that as the finest of compliments. 

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QUICK HITS

THE BEST SITCOM CHARACTER ON TV IS A LIBERTARIAN

‘REVENGE OF THE SITH’ CAME TOO LATE TO SAVE TRILOGY

FILM CAMEOS OF THE TWIN TOWERS

WHAT IF MARTY AND DOC WENT BACK TO 1967?

SCHWARZENEGGER MIGHT STAR IN INDIE THRILLER ‘CAPTIVE’

ROBERT ZEMECKIS OFFICIALLY DONE PLAYING WITH HIS COMPUTER

WHAT THE NOW-CANCELLED ‘HELLRAISER’ REMAKE MIGHT’VE LOOKED LIKE

BRENDAN FRASER AS WILLIAM TELL IN 3D

IS THIS THE MOST ACTION-PACKED (NSFW) TRAILER EVER?

 IS ‘BEAUTY AND THE BEAST’ COMING BACK TO TV?

‘KING’S SPEECH’ DIRECTOR SET TO REMAKE ‘LES MISÉRABLES’ WITH HUGH JACKMAN 

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CLASSIC PICK FOR TUESDAY, SEPT 13

FMC:

10:00 PM EST:  Ace In the Hole (1951) –  A small-town reporter milks a local disaster to get back into the big time. Dir: Billy Wilder Cast:  Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Bob Arthur. BW-111 mins, TV-14, CC.

Director Billy Wilder truly had stunning range as a director and writer. You would never guess that the man who made “Some Like It Hot” also directed this deep, dark piece of noirish cynicism.

Kirk Douglas — who never won a performance Oscar! — plays a cold-hearted reporter who exploits a human tragedy in the most craven way imaginable. He’s absolutely perfect in the lead role and if you think for a moment that members of our esteemed media aren’t capable of such things, you haven’t been paying attention.

The present-day MSM might not leave a man to die in a deep hole, but they’re mercenary character assassins in every sense of the word.

If “Ace In the Hole” is allegory, it’s only just barely. 

–Please send tips/suggestions/requests to jnolte@breitbart.com

–Please thank ScottDS for today’s awesome quick hits…

That tradition comes back strong this Friday with “Contagion,” a film that boasts a cast featuring such Oscar nominees and winners as Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet and Jude Law in addition to longtime TV and movie favorite Laurence Fishburne and three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston. Hell, Cranston took a part in this epidemic epic even though he does two brief scenes buried amid all the mayhem.

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Now, I know that for most BH readers, seeing the name “Matt Damon” at the bare minimum has them cracking their fingers as they ready a diatribe about how proud they are for never seeing one of his movies, despite the fact that he’s now among Clint Eastwood’s most frequent collaborators. I catch a lot of flak for liking these films like “Invictus” and “Hereafter,” but then again, I’m reviewing how well a movie is made rather than casting eternal judgment upon Matt’s soul.

I’ll point out when he puts a sucker punch – or at least I try. I’m not quite as hawkeyed as some of our dear readers. But this movie has a few ideological surprises in store, and I’ll spell them out right off the bat so that everyone can either cool down and read the rest of the review or perhaps on the other hand, to fuel the fire even more as people say “OK, those ARE good points, but it’s STILL Matt Damon! And he can never redeem himself!”

So, first off, Matt doesn’t come up with a  government conspiracy behind the epidemic, which is caused by a nasty intermingling of bat and pig that I’ll keep a secret since it makes for an awesome ending to the movie. In fact, the rare characters who imply that there’s a government epidemic causing the problem are all shot down.

The one character who espouses a conspiracy theory about the government and big pharmacies trying to kill us all for profit is himself proven to be the only scumbag exploiting the situation for money, and he’s a lone wolf who’s not tied to Corporate America or Big Pharmaceutical Companies. The problem in “Contagion” is unequivocally dealt with as a purely scientific mystery.

Second of all – and here’s the part where minds will perhaps literally blow open – when Damon finds that a neighbor has been shot and robbed at gunpoint by looters, he races out and finds a shotgun in that house and proceeds to wield it for several more scenes. It is absolutely clear that he sees a gun as key to his and his daughter’s safety and survival.

And third, there are a couple of subtle Christian touches in the film, as when a nun is shown comforting a patient, and another moment where a shelter in an Asian county has been constructed with an enormous cross on the roof when the characters involved are not even missionaries. Touches like that, even when small, are intentional in a Hollywood film and surprising when coming from this gang of actors and director Steven Soderbergh. Could they be a sign of hope that even liberal mainstream filmmakers are acknowledging Christianity does play a positive force in everyday life?

Now, on to the film itself:

Imagine your wife takes a business trip to Hong Kong, and when she comes home she seems to have a truly nasty case of the flu: sweats, shakes, splotchy skin and unending coughing and sniffles. Within two days, she passes out on the kitchen floor, foaming at the mouth and dies at the hospital – and within another 24 hours your six-year-old stepson is also dead from the same symptoms.

Now all you’ve got left is your teenage daughter and a horrible dose of survivor’s guilt, with not a single clue about how your wife got sick or the fact that world health officials consider her to be the Patient Zero, or first carrier, of a deadly global epidemic. The battle by that father to keep his daughter safe and maintain his sanity as the world collapses around them is just one of the six powerfully drawn, well-acted storylines in the new thriller “Contagion,” which marks an intelligently pulse-pounding return to form for Soderbergh, the Oscar-winning director of “Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic.”

“Contagion” plays like a smarter, more methodical take on the 1995 thriller “Outbreak,” in which Dustin Hoffman leads the fight to save the world from an outbreak of a deadly monkey virus. But where that film deteriorated into hokey fun and ludicrous action shenanigans from its diminutive star, “Contagion” has a more realistic and thoughtful approach that is all the more squirm-inducing because it seems far more realistic.

The film zips around the globe from Hong Kong to Minneapolis, from the heart of China to Chicago, and from London to Tokyo with each city’s population totals spelled out on screen to goose the fear of how many people could be wiped out in each locale. Soderbergh knows that dropping us into impersonal megacities like Tokyo, with 36 million people, while following individual contagion carriers effectively taps into our own daily fears of catching something from the person next to us on a bus, train or movie theater seat.

At the same time, he deploys an incredible cast with precision that makes the intertwining stories compelling to follow. Fishburne plays the head of the Centers for Disease Control, Winslet is an ace epidemic specialist, and Law nearly steals the show as a blogger who’s touting a cure for the epidemic and is alleging that a government conspiracy is behind the panic while hiding secrets of his own.

Add in Damon as the newly widowed father at the heart of it all and Paltrow as his quickly-deceased wife whose Hong Kong trip is retraced through security-camera footage, and viewers will find plenty of rewards in the acting alone. But writer Scott Z. Burns digs deeper than one expects, moving beyond thrills to realistically show how within a matter of weeks quarantines and diminishing food supplies could easily lead even our civilized society into mass panic and chaos.

And just when you think that a happy ending is on its way, Burns and Soderbergh play the ace up their sleeves by revealing how Paltrow got infected in the first place. That sequence of events is both completely plausible and utterly chilling – and  showing us that our worst nightmares are a step away from our everyday realities is the scariest thing of all.

Following in the footsteps of (among many other flower-children) Stephen Stills, Bonnie Raitt, Chrissie Hynde, Jimmy Buffet, and Carole King (who in 2002 serenaded Fidel Castro with a personal “You’ve Got a Friend”) guitar legend Jimmy Page made the pilgrimage to Fidel Castro’s fiefdom this week.

To Led Zeppelin’s former guitarist the visit probably seemed, not only fitting, but long overdue. Cuba was, after all, the first nation ruled by bearded long-hairs. Jean Paul Sartre, after all, hailed Cuba’s Stalinist rulers as “les Enfants au Pouvoir” (the children in power). Fidel Castro, after all, spoke at Harvard in 1959 on the same bill as pioneer beatnik Allen Ginsberg.

Remove the wispy beard and beret from the (late, thanks to Fidel Castro) revolutionary icon on those posters and t-shirts and you’ve got Jim Morrison of The Doors. Remove the cowboy hat from the (late, thanks to Fidel Castro) Revolutionary icon Camilo Cienfuegos and you’ve got Grateful Dead’s Gerry Garcia. Circa 1959, Raul Castro with his blond shoulder-length locks was a ringer for Joe Walsh circa Hotel California. These Cuban Stalinists were on the cutting edge of fashion. They pre-empted the Haight Ashbury look by a decade.

Castro’s captive (literally!) media, reports that Jimmy Page’s visit: “included tours of historic sites, and purchases of souvenirs such as the famous photograph of Che Guevara.”

In an interview with the BBC last year, Oscar and Cannes-winner Benicio del Toro explained the painstaking intellectual exertion that inspired his Che-mania: “I hear of this guy, and he’s got a cool name, Che Guevara! Groovy name, groovy man, groovy politics! So I came across a picture of Che, smiling, in fatigues, I thought, ‘Dammit, this guy is cool-looking!’”

In all likelihood, similar intellectual toil inspired Jimmy Page’s recent souvenir shopping spree in Havana.

For his role as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s movie Che, Benicio del Toro was recently honored by the peace-loving crowd in Hollywood and Cannes. For headlining their Concert for Peace. Jimmy Page was recently honored with the “Global Peace Award from the United Nations’ Pathway to Peace organization.

“We reject any peaceful approach! “declared the souvenir icon of the Concert for Peace’s honoree “Violence is inevitable! To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!”

“Hatred is the central element of our struggle!” raved this icon of flower-children. “Hatred that is intransigent….Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine… My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm!”

In fact, Jimmy Page should know that many Cuban youths “tuned-in and turned-on” to (smuggled) Led Zeppelin music in the 60’s and 70’s. But rather than meet with his Cuban fans, Jimmy was hosted by apparatchiks of the Stalinist regime that jailed and brutalized them en masse.

In a famous speech in 1961 Che Guevara denounced the very “spirit of rebellion” as “reprehensible.” “Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates” commanded the KGB –mentored Guevara. “Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service.”

Cuban “roquero” of the time Charlie Bravo recalls the process: “When Castro’s goons caught me with a Led Zeppelin record, they led me to a Stairway alright—but at bayonet-point and this stairway hardly led to Heaven, instead it led down into a dark jail cell.”

On the orders of Jimmy Page’s smiling hosts, Charlie was joined by tens of thousands of Cuban youths. A few years earlier the hundreds of Soviet KGB and East German STASI “consultants” who flooded Cuba in the early 60’s, found an extremely eager acolyte in Che Guevara. By the mid 60’s the crime of a “rocker” lifestyle—long hair, blue jeans, etc.–or effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” in bold letters above the gate and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

Today the world’s largest image of Jimmy Page’s souvenir icon adorns Cuba’s headquarters for Cuba’s KGB-trained secret police, a gang of Communist sadists who jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin’s own KGB and GRU—and many of their victims were guilty of nothing worse than listening to music by Jimmy Page.

Maybe that wasn’t a fun fact after all. 

Kind of an opposite of a fun fact, if you ask me.

But you didn’t.

Anyway, with ACORN gone, it leads me to two thoughts. One: if it were a right-wing entity, and the pranksters were lefties – this would immediately turn into a mega-million dollar movie, directed by Steven Soderbergh, with George Clooney comically hamming it up as the bad guy.

In fact, they should do that, anyway!

Turn ACORN into a drug company, with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles becoming whistleblowers who discover that the lifesaving cancer drug was made from fetuses! No wait. That won’t matter. It’s made from puppies! Right! Puppies!

Matt Damon could play O’Keefe, or possibly even Giles. He’ll take any excuse to show off his marvelous legs.

But you get my point. In the past five years, we’ve had two very funny movies by Sacha Baron Cohen, a performer who used either racist or overly obnoxious characters to create discomfort among clueless Yanks (who, for the most part, reacted politely). But none of his pranks ever exposed corruption or real, deadly hate. I’ve said it before – Cohen, a Jew, would have scored more points if he hit a Willesden mosque, instead of a southern rodeo.

But he’s the star.

Anyway, I look forward to the newest incarnation of ACORN. This stuff just doesn’t goes away, you know – it only finds another shell.

(What, you thought I wouldn’t end with a nut metaphor?)

And if you disagree with me, you’re a homophobe racist who bullies overweight flight attendants.

Steven Soderbergh made certain his new movie, “Che,” about the life of revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara, couldn’t be attacked — at least on a factual level. (CNN Entertainment, January 1, 2009)

“I didn’t mind someone saying, ‘Well, your take on him, I don’t really like,’ or ‘You’ve left these things out and included these things.’ That’s fine,” Soderbergh said. “What I didn’t want was for somebody to be able to look at a scene and say, ‘That never happened.’ “(CNN Entertainment, January 1, 2009)

Well, Mr Soderbergh (and CNN), pull up a chair.

Soderbergh’s movie shows Che Guevara steely-eyed and snarling with defiance during his capture. Why, only seconds before, Che’s very M-2 carbine had been blasted from his hands and rendered useless by a fascist machine gun burst!

Then the bravely grimacing Guevara jerks out his pistol and blasts his very last bullets at the approaching hordes of CIA-lackey soldiers!

The (typical) viewer gapes at the spectacle. His eyes mist and lips tremble at Soderbergh and del Toro’s impeccable depiction of such undaunted pluck and valor.

OK, but just where did Soderbergh and del Toro—utterly obsessed with historical accuracy–obtain this version of Che’s capture?

Why the notoriously shrewd and canny, the immensely suspicious and cagey, the infamously clever and perspicacious, Steven Soderbergh transcribed this sterling and utterly indisputable account of Che’s capture exactly as penned by: Fidel Castro!

And you yokels who think that the testimony of a Communist dictator should merit the same skepticism as that of, say, a U.S. industrialist, have obviously never been subject to Soderbergh’s multiple-Oscar-nominated Erin Brockovich.

Why the man who mentored Soderbergh’s film for impeccable historical honesty is also on record for the following testaments:

“Again I STRESS! I am NOT A COMMUNIST!  And Communists have absolutely no influence in my nation!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959)

“Political power does interest me in the least! And I will NEVER assume such power!” (Fidel Castro, April 1959)

But as evidenced by Steven Soderbergh’s films, the author of these proclamations merits his version of Che’s capture transcribed on the silver screen as gospel. As for any skeptics…? Hah! Only those insufferable Tea-Partiers could conceivably swallow the laughable propaganda questioning Che’s heroism and Fidel Castro’s integrity and honesty!

Fidel Castro, you see, wrote the forward to Che‘s Diaries wherein this Davy Crocket-esque-at-the-Alamo version of events appears. These diaries were published in Castro’s Cuban fiefdom by the Stalinist dictator’s very own propaganda ministry. So lest they unwittingly fudge their film’s historical accuracy, Soderbergh and co-producer Benicio Del Toro were scrupulous in repeatedly visiting Castro’s Stalinist fiefdom to get the unvarnished truth straight from Castro’s own propaganda ministry!

On the other hand, a mental defect, diagnosed by my physician as “not believing Communist dictators, especially after living under them,” led your humble servant here, while researching my book, to dig-up and study the actual records of the men actually on the scene of Che Guevara’s capture, and who today live in places where they need not fear Castro’s firing squads and torture chambers for the crime of telling the truth.

As might be expected, (but mostly by Tea-Partiers and other such yokels,) this mental defect led to the discovery of major “discrepancies” between Soderbergh and del Toro’s Fidel Castro-mentored film and the historical truth.

In fact, on his second to last day alive, Che Guevara ordered his guerrilla charges to give no quarter, to fight to the last breath and to the last bullet. With his men doing exactly that, Che, with a trifling flesh leg-wound (though Soderbergh’s movie depicts Che’s leg wound ghastlier than Burt Reynolds’ in “Deliverance”) snuck away from the firefight, crawled towards the Bolivian soldiers doing the firing, then as soon as his he spotted two of them at a distance, stood and yelled: “Don’t Shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!”

His captor’s official Bolivian army records that they took from Ernesto “Che” Guevara:  a fully-loaded PPK 9mm pistol. And the damaged carbine was an M-1—NOT the M-2 wrote he was carrying in his own diaries. The damaged M-1 carbine probably belonged to the hapless guerrilla charge, Willi, who Che dragged along—also to his doom.

But it was only after his (obviously voluntary) capture that Che segued into full Eddie-Hasquell-greeting-June-Cleaver-mode. “What’s your name, young man?!” Che quickly asked one of his captors. “Why, what a lovely name for a Bolivian soldier!”

“So what will they do with me?” Che, desperate to ingratiate himself, asked Bolivian Captain Gary Prado. “I don’t suppose you will kill me. I’m surely more valuable alive…. And you Captain Prado!” Che commended his captor. “You are a very special person!… I have been talking to some of your men. They think very highly of you, captain!.. Now, could you please find out what they plan to do with me?”

From that stage on, Che Guevara’s fully-documented Eddie Haskell-isms only get more uproarious (or nauseating). But somehow none of these found their way into Soderbergh’s film.

And oh!  Didn’t Che Guevara mount his steed and grab his lance as the (self-appointed) liberator of South America’s indigenous peoples fro  exploitation by the continents’ Europeans descendants?

Well, based on this picture, taken by the men who captured and killed him—Che’s message seemed woefully under-appreciated by his intended “beneficiaries.” I only note one obviously European-descendent person in the picture.