Not Really Silence vs Noise

When I checked out The Horse Whisperer and The Motorcycle Diaries at the same time, the talkative old guy behind the library counter commented on how mutually exclusive they would be sound-wise.  He seems to have watched every movie in the stacks and I demurred to his joke.  Not, Redford only stares and crouches and clucks at the horse and Ernesto and Alberto's motorcycle conks out half way through the movie.

Of course, no one else in this family would be caught dead watching The Motorcycle Diaries.  Any of my comments about it being set in 1952, long before Che Guevara became a famous Communist, were still met with derision and charges that deep in my bones I was still a hippie sympathizer.  Not, but it is interesting to think back now that the old guard is dying in Cuba and Venezula.  What little progress.  What impossible lofty, dreams.

Here again, like the scope and vista of Montana in The Horse Whisperer, TMD shows off the beauty of the geography and people of Argentina, Chile and Peru.  The poverty of indigenous peoples is presented aloofly, without the heavy handed Hollywood messaging that a more current version of the story might overlay.  Ernesto is young, idealistic in his need to help lepers.  The extent to which is journey across South America abetted his radicalization is subtle, almost tangential.

The casting is superb.  The actor who plays Alberto jumps off the screen; Che is more moody and shy.  Is this the balancing buddy movie to the chick flicks I've been watching?  It is Uneasy Rider.