Word: south
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Most people bring back the usual mementos from their overseas vacations: photographs, T-shirts, diarrhea. The BBC Natural History Unit, however, came home with something better. A crew of scientists, academics and filmmakers from the British broadcaster visited the South Pacific island of Papua New Guinea this past spring to film a nature documentary and in the process discovered more than 30 new species of animals. Among the unknown creatures - all living inside the crater of the extinct volcano Mount Bosavi - was a giant rat that measured 32.2 in. and weighed more than 3.3 lb., making...
...written by the British-Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali, author of the 2006 study Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, and photographed in part by docu-doyen Albert Maysles - is amateur night as cinema, as lopsided and cheerleadery as its worldview. U.S. foreign policy, Stone asserts, divides South American nations into "friends, whose leaders do what we tell them to do, and enemies, whose leaders occasionally disagree with us." His film is no more nuanced. He sees the geopolitical glass as all empty (the U.S. and its world-banking arm, the International Monetary Fund) or all full...
Stone extends his rigorous dichotomy to the film's structure. The first half focuses on Chávez, the second on other South American heads of state who tilt to the port side: Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, Ecuador's Rafael Correa, Argentina's Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Bolivia's Evo Morales and the grand old man of social revolution, Raúl Castro. (Stone profiled Raúl's brother in a similarly indulgent 2003 poli-doc, Commandante.) The only missing socialist leader is Daniel Ortega, President of Nicaragua...
...South of the Border is a near sibling to the Michael Moore docu-comedy Capitalism: A Love Story, which premiered at Venice last night and which looks like a masterpiece of attitudinal moviemaking next to Stone's slapdash effort. Moore appears in a news clip from 2007, lecturing Wolf Blitzer on what the filmmaker saw as CNN's gutless coverage of the U.S. Iraq invasion. Moore and Stone share the notions that capitalism can be predatory and that priests, in the U.S. and Paraguay (where the President is a former Catholic bishop), are all liberation theologians. And in both films...
Just when Kim Jong Il, the North Korean dictator, had evidently embarked on one of his occasional charm offensives - releasing hostages (two Americans and five South Koreans), sending envoys to the South for former President Kim Dae Jung's funeral, and reopening some traffic across the Demilitarized Zone that divides the continent - he has also reminded the world that getting North Korea to get rid of its nuclear program will be as difficult as ever. On Sept. 4, Pyongyang, via its state-run news agency, noted matter-of-factly that it was in the "last phase" of its uranium-enrichment...