Oliver Stone‘s South of the Border, cowritten by Tariq Ali and premiering at the Venice Film Festival on Monday, is a friendly portrait of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. And that’s cool because, hey, a little balance would be a nice thing. Chavez is a big-ego personality who likes to swagger around, but I’ve been sickened for years over the relentlessly negative portrait of the guy as pushed along by mainstream U.S. media. The film that sold me on Chavez being an impassioned nationalist and an understandably defensive firebrand was The Revolution Will Not Be Televized.