City of God

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🎙️ EPISODE 558: 09.20.22 Twenty years on and without the privilege (privilege?) of having gotten to see it when or around when it came out, City of Gods plays like the relic that it is. I can appreciate its gritty rawness, in both its uncompromising depiction of violence and the equally disturbing performances acting out said violence (usually by child actors), but I can also recognize it as a product of the time. I am often criticizing the early to mid 00s for its reliant on over saturated blow-out colors and hyper-paced, anxiety-inducing edits. And this, even though it was made a world away from the American films most often the culprit of those tropes, falls right in line. But despite all that, its most egregious flaw is its character development or lack-thereof. All the bad guys are faceless sociopaths and the victims are never flushed out enough to truly warrant the audience's empathy. And when the mindless violence does strike a nerve it often feels cheap. Like this little kid who gets shot in the foot. It doesn't even feel like he's acting...

You don't need to have the subtitles on to tell that he's truly scared. And that made me feel more sick than sad. So, sure, while a rawness was achieved visually, the emotional resonance came up short.

I'm willing to chalk up some of my disconnect here to that divide of passing time. But for the most part, this wasn't for me.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 557 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 559 ⫸

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City of God (Portuguese: Cidade de Deus) is a 2002 Brazilian epic crime film co-directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, released in Brazil in 2002 and worldwide in 2003. Bráulio Mantovani adapted the story from the 1997 novel of the same name written by Paulo Lins, but the plot is loosely based on real events. It depicts the growth of organized crime in the Cidade de Deus suburb of Rio de Janeiro, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s, with the film's closure depicting the war between the drug dealer Li'l Zé and vigilante-turned-criminal Knockout Ned. The tagline is "If you run, the beast catches you; if you stay, the beast eats you." It was released on May 18, 2002.