My favourite communist werewolf

My exam is tomorrow. After this weekend's sessions, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I fail, it'll be because I panic, because I know how to drive now. If I pass, I'll miss the guy guiding me. He finally taught me how to parallel park properly yesterday by launching into a stream of infuriated Gallic profanity when I just gently backed up crooked and hoped for the best for the 30th time. I'm becoming a hardened old wench and it seems like nothing but blistering fury can reach me any more. Anyways, now I know how to parallel park, and all the other little tricks. It will just be a question of staying tense enough at the exam to concentrate on what I'm doing, and not so tense that I start screaming 'AH, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO, WHAT DO I DO??????' when I enter the freeway.

Mostly spent the weekend explaining to myself that failing the exam the first time, as most people do, won't be a catastrophe because my mother will still think I'm smart, I've got enough money to keep renting the training car, we've decided not to move for more than a year so I've got the time, et cetera cetera. The F-word took care of the mechanics of most things though and we still managed to circulate responsibly in the evenings. Among other things we saw the second part of the Che movie. Benecio del Toro is unsettlingly good and it was nice to see Franka Potente again, even if her face did get eaten by piranhas, but I liked the structure of the first part better, and would really have preferred to see the structure of the first part brought into the second.

This was a man who for all his violence and ideological failures to compromise was a politician with enough legitimacy, whatever that means, to get up in front of the UN and tell everybody what bastards they were, and then he was shot like a dog in a pit trap. The response to his legitimacy, which he won by both violence and popular frenzy, was to try to illegitimate him with violence and silence - no words, just sudden pictures of an emaciated cadaver. And I think the structure of the two movies failed to get that into relief - that by overlaying the Cuban revolution with the UN harangue, and just showing Bolivia as a snuff film, it didn't do credit to the factors that make the man an honest-to-goodness hero in Latin America, and not just some stern-looking jerk on a North American t-shirt. The movies showed him as a martyr but not in more detail as a one-man symptom of the ruling hegemony's weakness, which I think they could have done by bringing the structure of the first movie through to the second.

Anyways, it was still worth watching. Benecio del Toro, man, that guy is the fucking tits. I can't wait for the Wolfman movie. Werewolves and Benecio del Toro together. Jesus. They've finally made a film version of my animus.