City of God VRP
Two boys growing up in a violent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro take different paths: one becomes a photographer, the other a drug dealer.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioUE_5wpg_E
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317248/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_God_%282002_film%29
Fernando Meirelles’ City of God is a sweeping tale of how crime affects the poor population of Rio de Janeiro. Though the narrative skips around in time, the main focus is on Cabeleira who formed a gang called the Tender Trio. He and his best friend, Bené (Phelipe Haagensen), become crime lords over the course of a decade. When Bené is killed before he can retire, Lil’ Zé attempts to take out his arch enemy, Sandro Cenoura (Matheus Nachtergaele). But Sandro and a young gangster named Mane form an alliance and begin a gang war with Lil’ Zé. Amateur photographer Buscape (Alexandre Rodrigues) takes pictures of the brutal crime war, making their story famous. City of God was screened at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
Synopsis:
Taking place over the course of over two decades, City of God tells the story of Cidade de Deus (Portuguese for City of God), a lower class quarter west of Rio de Janeiro. The film is told from the viewpoint of a boy named Rocket (Busca pé in Portuguese) who grows up there as a fishmonger’s son, and demonstrates the desperation and violence inherent in the slums. Based on a real story, the movie depicts drug abuse, violent crime, and a boy’s struggle to free himself from the slums’ grasp.
The movie begins cinematically depicting chickens being prepared for a meal. A chicken escapes and as an armed gang chases after it bumps into Rocket who believes that the gang wants to kill him. The movie then flashes back ten years earlier, to tell the story of how he got himself into that position.
Three “hoodlums”, “The Tender Trio”, one being Rocket’s brother, Goose, are terrorizing local businesses with armed holdups. In Robin Hood fashion they split part of the loot with the citizens of City of God and are protected by them. Li’l Dice is a hanger-on who convinces them to hold up a motel and rob its occupants. Li’l Dice (“Dadinho” in Portuguese), serving as lookout, fires a warning shot, then proceeds to slaughter the inhabitants. The massacre brings on the attention of the police forcing the three to quit their criminal ways. Each meets an untimely end, except one who decides to join the church. Goose, Rocket’s brother, is slain by Li’l Dice after robbing the younger boy and his friend Benny who have been hiding out and committing crimes themselves.
The movie fast forwards a number of years. Li’l Dice now calls himself Li’l Zé (“Zé Pequeno” in Portuguese), and, along with his childhood friend Benny, he establishes a drug empire by eliminating all of the competition except for a drug dealer named Carrot (“Cenoura” in Portuguese). Meanwhile, Rocket has become a part of the “Groovies” a hippie-like group of youth that enjoy smoking pot. He begins his photography career shooting his friends, especially one girl that he is infatuated with, but who is dating another boy.
A relative peace has come over City of God under the reign of Li’l Zé who plans to eliminate his last rival, Carrot, against the judgment of his best friend Benny, who is keeping the peace. At one point, his best friend and partner in crime Benny has decided to become a “playboy” and becomes the “coolest guy in City of God”. Eventually, along with the girl that he has wooed away from Rocket, he decides to leave the criminal life behind to live on a farm. However, he is gunned down at his going away party by former drug dealer, Blackie, who is actually aiming for Li’l Zé. Benny was the only thing keeping Li’l Ze from taking over Carrot’s business, so now Carrot is in danger.
Li’l Zé humiliates a peace loving man Knockout Ned at the party and afterwards rapes his girlfriend and kills Ned’s uncle and younger brother. Ned turns violent and sides with Carrot. After killing one of Li’l Ze’s men, Ned starts a war between the two rival factions that creates a “Vietnam” of City of God. Jealous of Ned’s notoriety in the newspapers, Li’l Zé has Rocket take photos of himself and his gang which, unknown to Rocket, are taken by a reporter and published in the daily paper. Rocket then mistakenly fears for his life believing that Li’l Zé will want to kill him for it. In actuality, Li’l Zé is pleased with his newfound fame.
Coming full circle, Rocket is startled by Li’l Zé’s request that he take a picture of the gang which had been chasing the chicken at the beginning of the film. Before he can, however, a gunfight ensues between the two gangs, but is broken up by the police. Ned is killed by a boy who has infiltrated his gang to avenge his father, who was killed by Ned during a bank robbery. Li’l Zé and Carrot are arrested and Carrot is taken away to be shown to the press. Li’l Zé is shaken down for money, humiliated and finally released, all of which is secretly photographed by Rocket. After the cops leave, the Runts (a gang of young children who robbed and terrorized the local merchants) come upon Li’l Zé and shoot and kill him in retribution for him killing one of their gang earlier in the film. Rocket takes pictures of Li’l Zé’s dead body and goes to the newspaper.
Rocket is seen in the newspaper office looking at all of his photographs through a magnifying glass, and deciding whether or not to put the pictures of the crooked cops in the newspaper, or the picture of Ze’s dead body. The photos of the cops would make him famous but put him in danger, while the photos of Li’l Zé would guarantee him a job at the paper. He decides to take the safe route and gives the paper the picture of Li’l Zé’s bullet-ridden body, which runs on the front page.
The story ends with the Runts walking around the City of God, making a hit list of the dealers they plan to kill to take over their drug business.
Reviews:
FILM REVIEW; Boys Soldiering in an Army of Crime
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: January 17, 2003
In ”City of God,” Fernando Meirelles’s scorching anecdotal history of violence in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, a fretful boy with the cute nickname Steak & Fries (Darlan Cunha), begs for a gun that would certify his membership in one of two rival gangs. ”I smoke, I snort, I’ve killed and robbed,” he pleads none too convincingly. ”I’m a man.”
Handed a weapon he doesn’t know how to use, this eager new recruit, whose voice has barely begun to change, rushes to join one of the clashing posses of armed children swarming through Cidade de Deus (City of God). A sprawling housing project built in the 1960’s on the outskirts of Rio and left to fester in a poisonous stew of poverty, drugs and crime, it has degenerated into a war zone so dangerous that visitors from outside risk being shot to death.
The movie traces the neighborhood’s decline over a decade and a half, from a sun-baked shantytown of earth-colored bungalows where the children while away the days in soccer games and petty thievery into a shadowy slum teeming with armed adolescent warriors.
The portrait of a boy soldier enlisting in a volunteer criminal army with an astronomical mortality rate is one of many profoundly unsettling images that jostle through the film. Another is a scene in which a gangster coerces a frightened boy, who has been poaching on his territory, to choose between being shot in the hand or the foot.
As the victim, who chooses the foot, hobbles away in agony, he is ordered not to limp.
”City of God,” which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is the latest and one of the most powerful in a recent spate of movies that remind us that the civilized society we take for granted is actually a luxury. Although the police pop up now and again in Cidade de Deus, law and order are as scarce on these mean streets (just minutes away from one of the world’s most glorious beaches) as they are in the slums of 1860’s Manhattan depicted in Martin Scorsese’s ”Gangs of New York.”
Anyone who once dressed up as a cowboy and played shoot-’em-up games with the neighborhood kids will wince with sadness as these packs of children cavort through the streets, flourishing real guns as though they were toys and chattering excitedly about murder.
”City of God,” which has already created a sensation in Brazil, was adapted from a best-selling novel by Paulo Lins, who grew up in Cidade de Deus. Its narrator, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), is a young photographer from the same neighborhood whose loose-jointed yarns follow the fates of a number of his childhood acquaintances. What saves Rocket from being consumed by the thug life around him is his passion for photography, along with his own comic ineptitude at crime.
The movie is divided into three chapters, each bleaker and more appalling than the one before; they parallel the intertwining destinies of Rocket and one of his childhood playmates, Li’l Dice (Douglas Silva). After growing up and changing his nickname to Li’l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora takes over the role), he ascends into a trigger-happy drug dealer and local kingpin.
”City of God” can be grimly amusing, as in the opening scene, in which Li’l Zé and his juvenile army amuse themselves by chasing a flustered chicken down the street. That ridiculous image introduces a note of absurdist humor that is carried forward by Rocket’s dispassionately chatty storytelling. From here the movie immediately flashes back to the 1960’s and Rocket’s recollections of a clique of adolescent outlaws called the Tender Trio, whose big-time criminal career begins with their robbery of a brothel.
As the story lurches ahead, the drugs become harder (cocaine supplants marijuana) and the weaponry more deadly. The second chapter, set in the 1970’s, focuses on Li’l Zé, now a grinning sociopath with an appetite for murder, and his reign of terror. The only thing keeping his crazier impulses in check is his lieutenant Benny (Phellipe Haagensen), a smart, good-hearted gangster with a hippie sensibility who eventually decides to abandon the criminal life. The farewell party Benny arranges for himself at which the merriment turns tragically violent (to the strains of ”Kung Fu Fighting”) is one of the film’s most spectacular set pieces.
The final third, set in the early 1980’s, finds Li’l Zé’s empire threatened by an even younger crew of pre-teenage gangsters called the Runts (some of them only 9 and 10), who disregard his authority. It all builds to a showdown between Li’l Zé and a rival band led by Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), a peaceable bus-fare collector who turns into avenging fury after Li’l Zé rapes his girlfriend and shoots his brother.
Rocket, meanwhile, cinches his escape from the criminal life when his sensational photo of Li’l Zé and his posse winds up on the front page of a newspaper. Resigned to being killed for exposing the gangster, Rocket instead finds himself hired by the publicity-hungry thug as a kind of court photographer. Most of the movie’s final bloodbath is observed through his camera’s lens.
If its panoramic scenes of street fighting recall ”Gangs of New York,” the tone and structure of ”City of God” are closer to Mr. Scorsese’s ”Goodfellas,” with which it shares the same attitude of brash nonchalance and fondness for tall-sounding tales.
Underscored by samba music, much of the treachery and violence unfold in what could be described only as a party atmosphere.
Because it was filmed with hand-held cameras on the streets of Rio (but not in Cidade de Deus) with a cast that includes some 200 nonprofessional actors, ”City of God” conveys the authenticity of a cinéma vérité scrapbook. Cesar Charlone’s restless cinematography is a flashy potpourri of effects that include slow and accelerated motion, the use of split screens and a dramatically varied expressionistic palette.
As the movie’s frenetic visual rhythms and mood swings synchronize with the zany, adrenaline-fueled impulsiveness of its lost youth on the rampage, you may find yourself getting lost in this teeming netherworld. To experience this devastating movie is a little like attending a children’s birthday party that goes wildly out of control. You watch in helpless disbelief as the apple-cheeked revelers turn into little devils gleefully smashing everything in sight.
”City of God” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has scenes of violence and graphic sex talk.
CITY OF GOD
Directed by Fernando Meirelles; written (in Portuguese, with English subtitles) by Braulio Mantovani, based on the novel by Paulo Lins; director of photography, Cesar Charlone; edited by Daniel Rezende; music by Antônio Pinto and Ed Côrtes; art director, Tulé Peake; produced by Andrea Barata Ribeiro and Maurício Andrade Ramos; released by Miramax Films. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 130 minutes. This film is rated R.
WITH: Seu Jorge (Knockout Ned), Alexandre Rodrigues (Rocket), Leandro Firmino da Hora (Li’l Zé), Phellipe Haagensen (Benny), Douglas Silva (Li’l Dice) and Darlan Cunha (Steak & Fries).
No ‘City’ for children / Brutal Brazilian film set in slums near Rio de Janeiro
Octavio Roca, Chronicle Dance Critic
Published 4:00 am, Friday, January 24, 2003
There is little hope in the “City of God.” Relentless violence, casual murders, rape as revenge and so many children with guns: That is the reality of life in the Brazilian slums that inspired Paulo Lins’ novel and now Fernando Meirelles’ motion picture. “City of God” is brutal, tough to watch but impossible to ignore.
The stench of brutality drenches this film, which tells the tale of boys who grow up to be gangsters in one of the most dangerous ghettos on earth.
It was good intentions and probably not irony that led Brazilian authorities to give the name City of God to a doomed housing project not far outside Rio de Janeiro. The favela fast became a lawless territory where even corrupt police officers only rarely ventured, an inferno with its own rules and a dangerous indication of how very fragile civilized society is.
“City of God” is narrated by Rocket, a kid who finds a chance to get out of the ghetto by becoming a photojournalist. Through his eyes we see psychotic Li’l Ze and the good-natured Benny, of Clipper, Steak & Fries, Shaggy and Goose. Different actors, most of them amateurs recruited from the slums, play the boys at different ages from the 1960s to the early ’80s.
“Having a hood for a brother sucks,” says one of them. Yet being a hood seems to be a seductive option for these boys, some of whom are painted as very bad from the start. Li’l Ze, the worst of them, gets a taste for murder when he is only 11 and called Li’l Dice; by his 20s he leads a gang of drug- dealing killers that Rocket will photograph for the local press. Some boys try to get out but, as it happens in these tales, can’t.
Early on in the film, the boys plan to rob a sex motel, but the robbery does not go as planned and there are bloody bodies everywhere. The entire episode is actually shown in sections throughout the picture, revealing layers of detail in retrospect. One of the most gripping revelations is a close-up of Li’l Dice, played with eerie flatness by the 11-year-old Douglas Silva, shown giggling with delight as he shoots his victims point blank.
Later, in a scene that is the emotional climax of the picture, the older Li’l Ze decides some of the young hoods in his turf need to learn a lesson. He gives a child who looks no older than 10 a choice of being shot in the hand or in the foot. The kid, who himself has just been shooting people, breaks into sobs. If “City of God” had more scenes like this, it would be a devastating masterpiece.
The heartbreaking humanity and heartless cruelty of the very young and very poor form one of the more unsettling paradoxes of urban life. Filmmakers with a conscience have explored it with revelatory results, from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brilliant 1961 debut “Accatone” to Barbet Schroeder’s disturbing 2001 “Our Lady of the Assassins.”
Wasted lives, always brutal, too often brief, are also the subject of films such as Luis Bunuel’s ‘Los olvidados,” Hector Babenco’s “Peixote” and even “Central Station,” directed by the same Walter Salles who happens to be a presenter of “City of God” along with Miramax. What “City of God” is missing that these great pictures have is the sort of moral clarity and political focus that make for lasting emotional impact.
“City of God” is shocking but not moving, at least not in proportion to its subject. The messy violence, especially of children against other children but also in a particularly gruesome rape scene, is almost casual. The narrator, played first by Luis Otavio and then by the older Alexandre Rodrigues, constantly speaks in a glib tone that adds unwelcome irony to a story that should move even so-called compassionate conservatives to tears.
There is a dangerous mythologizing of these young gangsters in Meirelles’ film, a romanticizing of their camaraderie and, above all, a lack of any outsider’s point of view, if only to add definition to the horrors on screen. A master like Martin Scorsese pulls off just this sort of insular amoral universe in “Goodfellas,” to which “City of God” owes more than a little. But the lighthearted tone of “Goodfellas” fits Scorsese’s comedy of adult gangsters much better than the often glib narration of “City of God” does the children’s tragedy Meirelles wants to tell.
Still, this is a serious film. It is easy to understand why Brazil picked “City of God” as its foreign-language Oscar entry, why the buzz has been so strong for the picture in festivals from Cannes to Mill Valley. “City of God” cannot be dismissed.
Braulio Mantovani’s script, adapted from the novel by Paulo Lins, proves tighter than one might feel while watching the finished product. The film’s narrative structure is anything but linear as it zig-zags between decades, but every piece of the dizzying puzzle falls into place by the Jacobean bloodbath of a finale.
Cesar Charlone’s grainy cinematography and Daniel Rezende’s frantic editing are a tad self-conscious: All the constant cutting away and the bleeding colors after a while begin to look like television’s “Boomtown” or “NYPD Blue. ” But the speed of the tale works. “City of God” is long and difficult to watch, but it is never dull. . This film contains scenes of rape and other graphic violence.
4 stars
January 24, 2003
“City of God” churns with furious energy as it plunges into the story of the slum gangs of Rio de Janeiro. Breathtaking and terrifying, urgently involved with its characters, it announces a new director of great gifts and passions: Fernando Meirelles. Remember the name. The film has been compared with Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” and it deserves the comparison. Scorsese’s film began with a narrator who said that for as long as he could remember he wanted to be a gangster. The narrator of this film seems to have had no other choice.
The movie takes place in slums constructed by Rio to isolate the poor people from the city center. They have grown into places teeming with life, color, music and excitement–and also with danger, for the law is absent and violent gangs rule the streets. In the virtuoso sequence opening the picture, a gang is holding a picnic for its members when a chicken escapes. Among those chasing it is Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), the narrator. He suddenly finds himself between two armed lines: the gang on one side, the cops on the other.
As the camera whirls around him, the background changes and Rocket shrinks from a teenager into a small boy, playing soccer in a housing development outside Rio. To understand his story, he says, we have to go back to the beginning, when he and his friends formed the Tender Trio and began their lives of what some would call crime and others would call survival.
The technique of that shot–the whirling camera, the flashback, the change in colors from the dark brightness of the slum to the dusty sunny browns of the soccer field–alert us to a movie that is visually alive and inventive as few films are.
Meirelles began as a director of TV commercials, which gave him a command of technique–and, he says, trained him to work quickly, to size up a shot and get it, and move on. Working with the cinematographer Cesar Charlone, he uses quick-cutting and a mobile, hand-held camera to tell his story with the haste and detail it deserves. Sometimes those devices can create a film that is merely busy, but “City of God” feels like sight itself, as we look here and then there, with danger or opportunity everywhere.
The gangs have money and guns because they sell drugs and commit robberies. But they are not very rich because their activities are limited to the City of God, where no one has much money. In an early crime, we see the stickup of a truck carrying cans of propane gas, which the crooks sell to homeowners. Later there is a raid on a bordello, where the customers are deprived of their wallets. (In a flashback, we see that raid a second time, and understand in a chilling moment why there were dead bodies at a site where there was not supposed to be any killing.) As Rocket narrates the lore of the district he knows so well, we understand that poverty has undermined all social structures in the City of God, including the family. The gangs provide structure and status. Because the gang death rate is so high, even the leaders tend to be surprisingly young, and life has no value except when you are taking it. There is an astonishing sequence when a victorious gang leader is killed in a way he least expects, by the last person he would have expected, and we see that essentially he has been killed not by a person but by the culture of crime.
Yet the film is not all grim and violent. Rocket also captures some of the Dickensian flavor of the City of God, where a riot of life provides ready-made characters with nicknames, personas and trademarks. Some like Benny (Phelipe Haagensen) are so charismatic they almost seem to transcend the usual rules. Others, like Knockout Ned and Lil Ze, grow from kids into fearsome leaders, their words enforced by death.
The movie is based on a novel by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the City of God, somehow escaped it, and spent eight years writing his book. A note at the end says it is partly based on the life of Wilson Rodriguez, a Brazilian photographer. We watch as Rocket obtains a (stolen) camera that he treasures and takes pictures from his privileged position as a kid on the streets. He gets a job as an assistant on a newspaper delivery truck, asks a photographer to develop his film, and is startled to see his portrait of an armed gang leader on the front page of the paper.
“This is my death sentence,” he thinks, but no: The gangs are delighted by the publicity and pose for him with their guns and girls. And during a vicious gang war, he is able to photograph the cops killing a gangster–a murder they plan to pass off as gang-related. That these events throb with immediate truth is indicated by the fact that Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the newly elected president of Brazil, actually reviewed and praised “City of God” as a needful call for change.
In its actual level of violence, “City of God” is less extreme than Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York,” but the two films have certain parallels. In both films, there are really two cities: the city of the employed and secure, who are served by law and municipal services, and the city of the castaways, whose alliances are born of opportunity and desperation. Those who live beneath rarely have their stories told.
“City of God” does not exploit or condescend, does not pump up its stories for contrived effect, does not contain silly and reassuring romantic sidebars, but simply looks, with a passionately knowing eye, at what it knows.
Philip French
Saturday 4 January 2003
Hollywood and European movies set in Latin America have almost invariably been stories of encounters with the exotic, whether Technicolor musicals (Down Argentine Way), historical epics (Aguirre, The Wrath of God), jungle tales (The Emerald Forest) or psychological dramas (Under the Volcano). Luis Buñuel’s remarkable body of Mexican movies in the years after the Second World War showed us something different and deeper, as did a number of moviemakers, mostly members of Brazil’s Cinema Nôvo, in the Sixties. Occasional films of note have turned up since then, but the past two years have seen the appearance of a succession of remarkable movies from Latin America that collectively invite the description of a resurgence. The latest is City of God (Cidade de Deus). Based on a Brazilian novel, it is the first film to be directed solely by Fernando Meirelles (his previous credits have been as co-director), a filmmaker based in São Paulo.
Like Amores Perros, whose director Alejandro Iñárritu has moved his family to the States because Mexico City is too dangerous a place to raise children, City of God is both artfully constructed and relentlessly violent. Its narrator, a boy in his early twenties nicknamed Rocket, is first seen in a teasing and amusing scene set around 1990. A chicken, intended as part of the pre-battle feast of a street gang in a Rio slum, escapes and is pursued by the demented young warriors, waving pistols and firing at the fugitive fowl. They turn into a narrow road where Rocket stands behind the chicken brandishing a camera. Behind him appears a row of heavily armed cops, and suddenly Rocket is caught in the middle, the likely object of crossfire between ruthless outlaws and corrupt authority. At this cliffhanging point he is introduced as the film’s narrator, and the movie flashes back to the Sixties to explain how he came to be there. The film subsequently covers almost a couple of decades in the interwoven lives of a group of kids from the same slum neighbourhood called City of God, often slipping back in time to fill in the details of a career. Finally it returns nearly two hours later to the chicken trying to cross the road. It is a bravura opening, and the rest of the picture lives up to it.
In the Sixties Rocket is a child whose elder brother has embarked on a life of crime, though their stern father tries to persuade them to work. But in this neighbourhood of unpaved streets and identical one-room houses without running water or electricity, there is little prospect of sustained rewarding employment. Rocket’s friend, the diminutive Li’l Dice, is brighter than the older boys he hangs out with. Despite his innocent air he has a precocious criminal mind and initiates a raid on a motel-cum-brothel in a nearby township that turns into a bloody massacre.
Li’l Dice grows up to become, as Li’l Zé, City of God’s most notorious gang leader, killing at will to sustain his share of the lucrative drug market. But Zé is a charmless sociopath, street smart but not worldly wise. He and his feckless associates are not clever enough to get into the really big time, and are trapped within an environment that occasionally attains a sense of community when engaging in street festivals.
Opposed to Zé is a man who commands respect for his decency rather than his menace. This is Upright Ned, a handsome young man who has attended school and done his military service, but been unable to get a better job than as a local bus conductor. In a 1930 Warner Brothers picture he would have been Pat O’Brien, the lad from the slums who became a priest, as opposed to the cocky James Cagney character who grew up to be a hoodlum. Instead, Ned is drawn into a vicious gang war after his girlfriend is raped by a jealous Zé and his father and brother murdered. He can’t go to the cops because they won’t venture into the slums, except when conducting mass punitive expeditions, and are more inclined to frame the innocent than arrest the guilty. All the young gang leaders become the target of the vengeful and the ambitious, and Zé is more likely to be punished by his own than by society. His comeuppance can arrive at any time, and most likely by a bullet in the back.
Pious Warner Brothers social-conscience films or sentimental tearjerkers such as Hector Babenco’s tale of Brazilian delinquents Pixote, set out explicitly to move our hearts out of sympathy for the underdog. Meirelles just shows us the dynamics of the world these boys come from, and he employs irony and dark humour as commentary. Rocket the narrator escapes from the slums by accident, not by any act of moral will or greater strength of character. He becomes a photojournalist for a leading Rio paper eager to get sensational shots of gang warfare when Zé gives him a stolen camera to take self-aggrandising pictures of his gang strutting with their weapons like Bonnie and Clyde.
Meirelles never dwells on anything. With harsh lighting, fast cutting, speeded-up action, jump cuts and much use of a fluid hand-held camera, his film moves with the lightning speed of a hungry young boxer punching way above his weight in round after bloody round. At times its explosive violence resembles Brian De Palma’s venture into the Hispanic underworld, Scarface, though it is far less glamorous. More often it brings to mind Scorsese’s Goodfellas in the way it covers a couple of decades in its characters’ lives in an apparently non-judgmental manner. Had City of God opened last week it would have been on my 10 Best list of 2002. It will be a remarkable year that keeps this film off anyone’s 2003 list.
