Word: south
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...rumor spread around the Lido like a Venezuelan oil fire: that the Venice Film Festival had paid for Oliver Stone's trip to show his new documentary South of the Border but wouldn't cover the expenses of the film's chief subject, Hugo Chávez. To some on the European (and American) Left, the President of Venezuela is a hero for his redistribution of wealth and truculent stance toward the U.S. under George W. Bush, whom he famously called the Devil. To others, his socialist agenda is tainted by human-rights violations and suppression of the opposition press...
...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...
...That can be seen clearly in the continuing stream of agreements tying together regional powers. In August, India inked two FTAs in a week, with South Korea and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). ASEAN and China are scheduled to bring most of the final tariff reductions of an FTA signed in 2004 into full effect by 2010. More deals are likely. Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou has made his policy priority reaching a comprehensive economic framework with China that would reduce tariffs on Taiwan goods entering the Chinese market. Yukio Hatoyama, Japan's presumptive Prime Minister...