The problem with collecting movies in my case is I like them. I love movies. Like a good book, If I really enjoy it, I’ll never be able to part with it. I love the fact that I can lose myself for a while in another world, another time and place, another story, someone elses story.
Friday night I was in a movie mood and looking through my library when I noticed over a half an hour went by and I was still browsing. Obviously my decision engine wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I laughed at myself and proposed the question, “You may want to figure out where you want to go before you leave on this journey?”
That brought me to The Motorcycle Diaries. This movie for me, is some of the best storytelling on film. It’s not a big Hollywood Blockbuster Production, yet it was an international co-production. Robert Redford was one of the executive producers and it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. It’s an intimate and personal story and the locations are amazing in scope and beauty.
The movie is a memoir of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Alberto Granado. They left Buenos Aires, Argentina in January of 1952 on “The Mighty One”, an old 1939 Norton motorcycle. They traveled almost 9,000 miles throughout Latin America from Argentina to Chile, Peru to Colombia and Venezuela.
But today, regardless if you’ve seen the movie or not, it’s the music that’s grabbing my heart. I love the theme, De Ushuaia la Quiaca, composed by Gustavo Santaolalla. Yes, this is one of those pieces I wish I would have written. It’s magical music amd instantly transports me to a place where simple intersects the profound.
Many movies today are formulaic and the music is engineered via big data to appeal to the largest segment of the audience as possible. It’s intended to spin off as another income stream. There’s nothing wrong with that, but my passion for this score is how well and authentically it serves the movie and how inseparable it is from the story. Everytime I listen to it I feel as if I remember being there somehow.
I hope you enjoy the music and if you haven’t seen the movie, put it on your list to watch. It’s a true story of adventure, coming of age, and two lives running parallel for a while. Friends who never intended to become part of history.
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