Saw Walter Salles' romantic adaptation of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's early diary (the Motorcycle Diaries). Che and a friend rode a dilapidated beast of a Norton around South America, tramping, working, and learning about leprosy. The 1952 journey was one which Guevara undertook expecting it to change his outlook on life, and it did: it opened his eyes to the plight of the proletariat, and he decided that the mass of them live lives of quiet desperation. Of futility.
The adaptation doesn't hide much, but certainly glosses incidents (Che doesn't eat empanadas in his memoir, although in the film two pretty Chilean girls treat him and his hungry traveling companion to a dozen of the savouries. They also give him the nick-name "Che", an apparently common term in Chile for Argentinians; et cetera).
The film shows South America harshly: a continent of hard-working people beaten down by Spanish imperialism and subsequent brutal colonialism. Rather than dwelling on past injustice, the diary and the movie focus on vignettes: an old waitress dying of asthma; day-labourers looking for work in the mines; a festive evening party in Chile. The cinematography is beautiful, and Che's bosom-friend Alberto Granada dances beautifully.
