Until last night I didn't know that Che Guevara grew up in an upper middle-class family in Buenos Aires and he was training to be a doctor when his friend Alberto Granado talked him into taking a motorcycle trip around South America. The motorcycle is old, the pair have little money, and the movie, The Motorcycle Diaries, has little plot (although, as my friend Helen commented, it has several "plotlets") but it's still worth watching: it's funny, touching, and even though we know it's romanticising things, it doesn't go overboard. Apart from being about Che Guevara, this movie is all about guys—the two friends are ill-prepared for just about everything (and they don't seem to care) and when things go wrong they run around swearing and blaming each other (but neither one seems to care about that either).

The movie (and the book that preceded it) is based on Guevara's journals, so we know that this was a life-changing trip for him—he meets the poor, sick and downtrodden in four different countries—but since the movie is mercifully short on revelatory conversations (thank god these are guys), we see that this is just one part of whatever it was that made Guevara into a revolutionary.

The DVD also features an interview with Alberto Granado who followed Che to Cuba and founded a medical school there while Che moved on to other revolutions and was killed in Bolivia by CIA-directed soldiers.