Simon says

I went with one of my kids to see the Spanish-language film “The Motorcycle Diaries.” Her high-school Spanish teacher had assigned the film for extra credit and we went like true innocents without knowing what it was all about — akin to the manner in which the film portrays Che Guevara. I wrote about the film in “Motorpsycho Diaries.”
In addition to writing screenplays (one an Oscar-winner, the other equally deserving) and witty mystery novels featuring the former sixties radical Moses Wine, our friend Roger L. Simon has taken a new gig reviewing films for National Review Online. In his column yesterday, Roger gets around to “Motorcycle Diaries” at the end of the review: “The adaptation game: More Oscar storytelling.”
After I wrote here about “The Motororcycle Diaries,” a reader directed me to this outstanding essay by Anthony Daniels (a/k/a Theodore Dalrymple) on the glorification of Che Guevara in general and the film in particular from the October issue of the New Criterion magazine: “The real Che.”
I’m a charter subscriber to the New Critierion. It’s one of my favorite magazines, but I had missed this outstanding essay until the reader pointed it out. The New Critierion also sponsors a good blog whose name derives from the first two words of Virgil’s Aeneid: Arma virumque (“Arms and the man”).

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