Tag: Cinema

Dark City.


Bleak Week 2003 continued yesterday, when I finally got around to seeing the much-praised City of God. And while this fierce, hyperkinetic Brazilian film has some serious problems, it’s a much better night at the movies than Sunday’s foray into 21 Grams.

From its very first scenes, in which our young photographer-protagonist finds himself trapped in the midst of a Mexican (ok, Brazilian) standoff between a street gang and the corrupt cops, City of God makes no bones about its debts to Scorsese and Tarantino. In fact, for much of the film, I was reminded of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, which brought to London much of the same snappy, experimental camerawork, “funny” gunplay, and street gangster-chic that’s on display here in Rio. But that metaphor only goes so far — this increasingly dark film ultimately feels very different than the breezy Lock Stock. In fact, while Scorsese, Tarantino, and Ritchie gangsters all generally find themselves on the wrong side of the law as a calling, the Brazilian youths here are born into it — crime, violence, and murder are an inescapable part of the Cidade de Deus.

Or is it? I know this movie is based on a novel based on real events, but at a certain point, right after the strobelight-marked murder of one of the film’s most likable characters, City of God just gets lost in its own cycle of violence. When L’il Ze, the cruelest hoodlum we meet on our travels, brutally rapes the girlfriend of Knockout Ned (we never see her again — she’s a plot point, not a character), a gang war ensues that drastically escalates the already considerable levels of death and carnage the audience has to deal with. In this final third, the film derails…it’s just too much.(Ken Turan aptly summed it up as “overkill.”) One goes from avidly following the travails of individual characters to watching most or all of them go down in a hail of gunfire.

Like I said, I know that much of this tale is based on a real gang war, and that the ridiculously high body count at the end of the film may have a solid grounding in fact. But at times City of God wants to have it both ways. When innocent bystanders are mowed down or child gangsters are forced to make extremely grisly life-and-death choices, we’re shocked sullen by the events depicted here. But when L’il Ze blows away his stooge Tuba in a fit of frustration, it’s a sight gag.

In sum, with swooping camerawork, great performances across the board, and a well-crafted narrative, City of God bridges the gap between Tarantino-cool gangsterism and shocking acts of violence reasonably well for its first two-thirds. Alas, it falters in the final act, and I found myself spending the last thirty-five minutes of a movie I’d quite enjoyed up til then keeping my head down and waiting for the last reports of gunfire to die away. Well worth seeing if you’re a fan of the hyperkinetic gangster genre, but ultimately City of God just can’t quite close the deal.

Haircut 100.

A day after the announcement of the Original Trilogy DVDs (coming this September – unfortunately, they’re the Greedo-shoots-first versions), a new wave of Episode III pics make it online, including Anakin and Padme in full, bad-hair glory. After killing Indy IV due to a, ahem, *bad script*, Lucas now has extra pressure to make this Star Wars movie a keeper. Well, I for one have gone to the dark side…if there’s hope for this franchise, I don’t sense it.

Sprockets, the Movie.


So I finally decided to make an end run around the January movie slump and catch up on some of the Oscar contenders of last year, and lo! I stumbled upon the most “Emperor has no Clothes” film experience I’ve had in a good long while. To wit, I have yet to see Amores Perros, but 21 Grams, despite pretty solid performances by its three leads, was a ridiculously ponderous and pretentious piece of work and, worse, just a flat-out dull film. It’s hard to talk about without going into major spoilers, so, if that’s a problem, I’ll leave you at this: Elvis Mitchell, who just went screaming down the Murphometer with this “film of the year” rave, owes me $10.25.

Still here? Ok, well, 21 Grams looks very nice, I’ll give it that. And the acting is universally good…poor Naomi Watts comes off rather shrill, but I don’t really blame her. That being said, Grams is a relentlessly downbeat, oh-so-sudsy soap opera for the arthouse crowd. And I do mean downbeat — there’s no joy in Mudville here. These three characters are basically stuck in the last twenty minutes of Requiem for a Dream for two and a half hours. Ok, sure, horrible things happen to good people all the time, even symbolic and portentous hit-and-runs. But the way bad mojo just piles up on these three souls throughout the movie is so deadening and ham-handed that it eventually becomes laugh-out-loud funny. (Seriously, there was a sequence near the end just after Naomi Watts wails about her child dying with (gasp) red – not blue – shoelaces on, and just before she’s simultaneously scolded by a nurse for her drug addiction and told she’s pregnant, where I finally turned on this soap opera of a film, and had to double over in convulsions to stop from breaking out into loud peals of awkward giggling.)

Yes, I know it’s horrible to titter at the tragic intertwining of a drug-addicted woman’s family wiped out in a tragic truck accident, her dying, infertile, heart-transplant lover, and the star-crossed ex-alcoholic jesus-freak recidivist who can’t hold down a job, maintain familial harmony, or drive home without Bad Stuff Happening. But, you know, it’s even worse for a film to milk grotesque amounts of tragedy to try to substitute for honest characterization or real human emotion. As I believe someone mentioned in the Slate movie club this year, it’s a wonder they didn’t bring a puppy onscreen at some point and start kicking the hell out of it.

Finally, just to add to the Sprockets-ness of the whole enterprise, the film’s narrative is completely splintered, with the story flipping back, forth, back, and forth again. For the first fifteen minutes or so, this made for an interesting viewing experience. But, by the end, (a) it adds nothing — you get to realize that there was absolutely no point in telling the film this way other than sheer artistic license — and (b) it’s detracting and distracting: you’re waiting desperately to see the two or three scenes that you know have been coming for an hour, just so the movie will end already. When these scenes finally do happen, of course, they’ve been foreshadowed for so long that they have no power left but the power to annoy.

In sum, 21 Grams was a pretty atrocious swing-and-a-miss. Sean Penn’s other movie last year, Mystic River, did a much better job of rooting tragic events in interconnected lives, mainly because it was grounded by a strong sense of place and a more realistic balance between light and dark moments. But, like its characters, this film just ambles around in its terminally depressed jag for so long that it loses any sense of perspective, and instead becomes just a vehicle for indulging the arthouse fallacy that misery is a substitute for character. By the end of this dull, implausible, flick, I had only one word on my mind: ANTS!

The Calculus Affairs.

In a strange bit of movie news, Steven Spielberg and Roman Polanski may be heading rival Tintin projects. Moreover, the Spielberg version is looking at Rupert “Ron Weasley” Grint or Jamie Bell as the boy detective in question…Not exactly star wattage, but I could see Bell in particularly working out. (And I could also see Spielberg going to the well and putting Tom Hanks or somebody as Captain Haddock.) As for a Polanski Tintin…I’m scared to think about it.

Confessions of Two Dangerous Minds.

By way of Quiddity, the cast of Hitchhiker’s Guide gets rounded out, and I like what I’m hearing. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Mos Def will be Ford Prefect (good race-neutral casting, although I hope he’s still British), Zooey Deschanel plays Trillian (how’d her agent ever manage to stop the Knightley Behemoth? Keira’s got more momentum these days than Kerry) and Sam Rockwell is Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the universe (That’s classic…but no word yet on how or if they’re casting his second head.) This should be fun.

El Retorno del Rey, extendida.

And before we write off Return of the King for good, there’s still room for a little more. A Spanish LotR fan site compiles all the Return of the King extended edition pics floating around, along with their thoughts (in Spanish) on how they’ll fit back in. (Thank you, Babel Fish.)