...Thumbs Down! Reviewed by Naomi Cohn I'd rather stay home on a Saturday night and smell my dog's Alpo-beef-chunks breath than pay money to watch Madonna prance around and "act" the role of that poor doomed filthy rich small-time actress, big-time Mistress Eva Duarte de Peron. I admit my biases about Evita go way back -- to freshman year in college when I had a Christian ROTC roommate who couldn't decide whether to be an engineer or a ballerina and who played a tape of the musical Evita incessantly. She dropped out after one semester but the cheesy odor of still permeates my consciousness. Those mediocre whiny tunes still ring in my ears. The thing about Evita that I never understood was why I was supposed to sympathize with this woman's problems -- like you can have pearls and diamonds and boudoir power and still get cancer, like the world's biggest tragedy is that even being hugely rich is no protection against death. Boo-hoo. There's this other problem, which has to do with the F-word. No, the other F-word: Fascism. How come no one's made a movie about the cute fuzzy side of Eva Braun? Of course Hilter's whore had no official governmental role, no ministries like Evita got to run. But I'm sure that Evita's role in running the ministries of health and labor was what attracted Madonna to the part. Descamisados- sympathizer or not, this woman Eva Peron was still a fascist. Like why should I spend two hours and seven dollars to see the whore of a dictator glorified, a woman who felt that the best way she could help the poor shirtless, essentially voteless people of her country was to drape herself in furs. That's something else that bugs me .. I mean these Peronistas were pretty second rate. I mean in Italy if you followed il Duce you got to be one of the camici neri -- a black shirt; in Germany a brown shirt (I guess to signify brown-nosing Hitler). In Argentina, all you got for the privilege of adoring Peron and his Barbie-Evita, with her latest Chanel, was the honor of being descamisado--shirtless. Great, where do I sign up? Interested in a critique of the cinematography and costuming? Ask somebody who saw the movie.

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