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Guzzanti doesnt speak with Jon Stewart, whose The Daily Show has made political satire and burlesque a nightly addiction for a million and a half Americans. But she does show excerpts from satirical series nearer home, including Rory Bremners Between Iraq and a Hard Place and the French puppet show Les Guignols de lInfo, in which effigies of Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Berlusconi and other European leaders sing a mockery of "We Are the World" (in English): "We f--- the world, / We f--- the children, / We f--- the world, the forest and the sea / So let us do it." Maybe even the Comedy Central censors would shiver at that.
Viva Zapatero!, which won a 15-20 min. ovation at last years Venice Film Festival, was Guzzantis immediate revenge on Berlusconi. Her ultimate revenge came this week, when the mogul-politico finally acknowledged the defeat he suffered in last months election.
Tragic Towns
They flit across our TV screens, these appalling images of devastation. We choke up a bit, perhaps send a donation to an appropriate charity, then go back to our lives. Because New Orleans is in America, and because it became a political embarrassment as well as a human disaster, Katrina got more sustained attention. But what of other natural catastrophes, like the tsunami in Indonesia? Or the Iranian city of Bam, which, on Dec. 26, 2003 — exactly a year before the Indonesian tsunami — was leveled by an earthquake. Of the 100,000 inhabitants, 30,000 died. The rest were left to flee, or live in rubble. In the poignant Voices of Bam, Dutch filmmakers Mariana Van Der Horst and Maasja Ooms patrol the devastated town and tiptoe into the minds of those who remain; the survivors speak, in poetic voiceover, of the family, the wives and lovers who live only in their memories, haunt their days and dreams.
A preventable tragedy occurred 28 years ago, in Jonestown, Guyana. Some 900 members of Jim Jones Peoples Temple — souls cleansed, brains washed — took poison and died at his command. Stanley Nelsons documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple interviews survivors and kin of the dead, and has a trove of footage to illuminate, if not explain, the seductive, destructive power of the Temple prophet.