The Aymara of South America were oppressed for centuries by Incas and the Spanish. Of Aymara descent, Juan Evo Morales Ayma—Evo Morales—became the first fully indigenous president of Bolivia in 2005. The head of Bolivia’s cocalero union movement representing coca farmers, Morales was elected largely as an act of national resistance to the U.S. government’s War on Drugs, which since 1980 has aped U.S. terrorism in Vietnam by bombing and napalming central Bolivian farms, further impoverishing farmers. The crop, which has been declared wholesome by the World Health Organization and Harvard University research, is widely used for tea; a processed form, however, yields cocaine. The U.S. might do well to determine why U.S. Americans need to numb so much anguish, pain and despair.
From Argentina and Bolivia, Alejandro Landes’s Cocalero, without intrusive voiceover narration, is a spirited documentary about the movement and Morales in the final days of his presidential campaign. (Morales had run for the office earlier and lost.) Morales’s low-key, youthful charm is close to irresistible when, referring to a rally as he gets a barber-shop bowl-shaped haircut, he beams, “I was told it was broadcast live on CNN for 18 minutes.”
With his sensitive handheld camera, Landes alternates between countryside and city, farmers and campaigners. A voter training session is deeply moving.
Morales: “By defending the coca leaf we learned to fight against water privatization. After defending our water, we moved on to defend our gas. . . .” Morales warns that if his socialist party isn’t allowed to win, the people will rise up and take power. It truly doesn’t seem as though he is agitating for insurrection, but the charge is made nevertheless. The campaign explains that Morales was simply warning of what might happen if elections wound up not being held. The ambiguity fascinates.
Strangely, registered rural voters, including likely Morales supporters who have already voted in previous elections, have disappeared from official voter lists.
In the U.S. we know what to call this: more Republican Party dirty tricks.
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FROST/NIXON (Ron Howard, 2008)
May 20, 2009The slashed title of Frost/Nixon, which Peter Morgan (best scenarist, San Francisco critics) adapted from his play, suggests some identity, even interchangeability, between the two protagonists, British television showman David Frost and disgraced U.S. president Richard Nixon. Perhaps they both possessed wobbly egos, grounded in their humble origins and the scar tissue of classist humiliations, and the effort it took to hide all this—from others, certainly, and sometimes even from themselves. Perhaps they had this in common: an unctuous personality covered with a “Pepsident smile” (which Harry S. Truman attributed to Nixon), a drive to succeed greased by the world’s seeming interest in having them fail. Or a rendezvous with destiny.
For the purposes of this highly fictitious (though amiable, engaging) drama, Frost, the politically savvy satirist—both writer and star—of TV’s legendary That Was the Week That Was, is reimagined as being “apolitical”; meanwhile, Nixon is given a soul, which the actor playing him, former pretty-boy Frank Langella, has said he made the focus of his performance, when of course the actual Nixon never had a soul. In 1977, three years after the presidential pardon that made impossible any U.S. emergence from the shadow of Constitutional crimes into which Nixon had plunged the nation and the office he had slimed and spoiled, Frost interviewed Nixon for television. Each man, having suffered a career slide, sought resuscitation, redemption, whatever. All this makes for fascinating entertainment—easily Ron Howard’s best film. We again wonder: Will Nixon, who resigned the presidency, admit his criminality?
Langella is very good as Nixon, especially with Nixon’s capacity for grandiose self-pity—but he cannot touch Philip Baker Hall’s incisive Nixon in Robert Altman’s brilliant Secret Honor (1984). Giving the best performance, and astonishingly moving, is Michael Sheen as pipsqueak Frost.
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