| Reviewer Roundup |
| 1. |
 | Harvey Karten |
| review follows |
|   |
| 2. |
| Steve Rhodes |
| read the review |
| |
|
Review by Harvey Karten
3½ stars out of 4
What does it cost for a New Yorker to go to Rio on vacation, air
fare, decent hotel, modest meals? $800? $1200? $2000? More
or less this is so. You'd think that anyone who already lives in
that Portuguese-speaking paradise would be excited about his
geographical luck, with quite a saving of air fare and tourist taxes
and the like. Yes, the people in Fernando Meirelles's "City of
God" are excited: thrilled to DEATH in fact, because the hormone-
filled, drug-riddled youth, ages six to eighteen, are living in what
almost amounts to being in an independent country. The ghetto,
called City of God either as the most ironic name even given to a
nabe or a statement about the Deity's Old-Testament vengeful
nature, is poverty stricken. There is little evidence in the City of
God of the tar-paper shacks you find all over the Third World
(including some just over the border from the San Diego Yacht
Club in Tijuana, Mexico). Yet there is little motivation for many of
the young people to study hard, to go to school, even to learn how
to write. Some are homeless and all seem to be without parental
guidance. What drives these kids into the gangs is just partly for
the money because many are in low-level positions waiting years
to rise in the "corporation." The joy of pure violence, of killing with
impunity, seems to drive them. One kid sums it all up: "What do
you mean, I'm a kid? I kill, I rob, I'm a man!"
"City of God," which is Brazil's official entry for the Oscar
competition in 2002 (though it will open in selected U.S. cities in
January '03), would probably be the most violent picture shown in
The Big Apple this year were it not for the bloodletting that informs
the first hour of "Gangs of New York" (also a Miramax production).
While the script comes from a six hundred page door-stopping
novel by Paulo Lins, much appears to be improvised, with the
mostly non-professional talent (chosen from among 800 kids in
the favela, or slum) having a grand time performing before
cinematographer Cesar Charlone's lenses and then obviously
edited well by Daniel Rezende who uses a non-linear approach for
the most part while dividing the one hundred stories in the novel
into decades rather than characters. Opening in the 1960's the
film focuses on two kids, one who turns out to be a born criminal
named L'Il Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora) while one, probably too
frail to become a real gangster, goes the other way. Rocket, the
nicest kid in the movie and presumably the novelist's alter ego,
loves photography but cannot afford a camera. Through a series
of altercations culminating in total warfare between two rival drug
gangs, one led by L'il Ze and one by the slightly less violent Carrot
(Matheus Nachtegaele)--Rocket acquires a camera and works his
way up until he gets a professional piece of work and a job
interning with a major Rio newspaper.
Meirelles takes up into the seventies and eighties, looking into
the society that is ruled by drug lords and not by the town council
or community board, in what must have been a scary 56 days of
photography (especially when one young man pointed a gun at his
head, a guy who was not in the script). By the conclusion
Meirelles shows us that a true story can be as brutal as "Pulp
Fiction," with characters whose adorable faces belie their
remorseless pattern of murder. They kill innocents, they kill their
rivals. Makes no difference. Leandro Firmino da Hora stands out
as a fellow you don't want to be caught in a dark favela with.
When Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein heard that the picture
was turned down by the New York Film Festival, he was
(according to The New Yorker magazine of 12/16/02 "much less
stoic.." "You're kidding," Weinstein said. "This is one of the
best films we ever made. It's in Portuguese. They're morons."
Point well taken.
Copyright © 2002 Harvey Karten
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out of 4
