"The City of God"
At first glance, one would expect a movie titled "City of God" to show how poverty and marginalization would make criminals of frustrated people. Instead we see how, in an atmosphere of unsupervised chaos, a single charismatic psychopath can hold sway over an entire population with the force of his sick personality. Set on the mean streets of a Rio de Janeiro slum (in the 'Cidade de Deus' housing project), "City of God" is a story about two boys who grow up in differing paths. One, Buscape (Rodrigues), becomes a photographer; the other becomes a drug dealer. The film follows their paths through a series of short stories, as we learn about the violent, often short lives of those wrapped up in the dangerous world of drugs and crime on Brazil's cruelest area.Based on a true story, this movie spans two decades, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. It depicts an account of the brutal teenage gangs that battle for control of the drug trade in the Rio de Janeiro slums. It is narrated through the eyes of Buscape, in his arid housing project 15 miles outside of Rio De Janeiro, beginning with him as a child looking up to the local hoods as they rob delivery trucks, and ending with him photographing them for the local newspaper as the
Good Kids in a Lawless World is an old plot but a serviceable one. And though the central story of City of God is nothing new, director Fernando Meirelles does not let his actors gather dust. He shoots them small against the dusty, baking streets, which keeps the performances visually understated and cuts between different characters' stories to keep any one of them from upstaging the other. Thus we never see them as performances. Just people-people we come across day-in day-out. Although this movie was difficult to watch, its parallelism to reality makes it hard to ignore. One of the film's most intriguing aspects is that it generates compassion for the characters who do not feel it for themselves. Life and death among the gang members boils down to who has the most power, either by the use of guns or connections to drug suppliers. That balance of power changes daily, but there is never any sympathy for the losers. The viewer seems to be more affected by some of the brutality than the people actually suffering the losses. The liberation of the situation is partly the point of the movie, as Buscape narrates in flashback; the implication is that the violence of his surroundings did not claim him. That he has lived to tell this story reaffirms that we mostly fi
Some common words found in the essay are:
City God, Buscape Rodrigues, Los Angeles, De Janeiro, Tijuana Mexico, Fernando Meirelles, city god, Lawless World, Criminals Homeless, , Third World, rio de, rio de janeiro, de janeiro, housing project,
Approximate Word count = 856
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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