One highlight of this week’s 2006 Film opus is Jason Shamai’s tale of DVD buying and watching in Mexico City. Here it is, sans the cuts required for it to fit into the newspaper:
When I got to Mexico City’s main ceremonial drag, where national parades and military marches are flanked by the Art Nouveau-style Palacio de Bellas Artes and the most striking Sears department store building you will ever see, it had transformed into a full-on tent city: blue tarp, camping tents, and thousands of political cartoons (ranging from the dryly satirical to the scatological) flowed east for at least half a mile and filled the Zócalo, the city’s vast central plaza where people had already been camped for weeks. Just a few days before, Mexico’s highest electoral court had confirmed National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderon as the country’s next president. His opponent Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), who challenged the cleanliness of the election that had him losing by a little over half of a percentage point, had asked that his camped-out supporters stay right where they were until they could force a vote-by-vote recount. The recount had been denied and Calderon was now certain to replace outgoing president Vicente Fox, but AMLO’s supporters were still there in their virtual city within a city.