Film Freak Central

Armageddon Time (2022)

***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Anthony Hopkins
written and directed by James Gray

by Angelo Muredda "All the great artists sign their work," Anthony Hopkins's benevolent grandfather Aaron tells his aimless but creatively-inclined grandson Paul (Banks Repeta) early in Armageddon Time, James Gray's autobiographical profile of growing up in Flushing, Queens as part of a tight-knit Russian-Jewish family. That advice seems to weigh heavily on Gray, who places it at the top of a ladder above less helpful artistic feedback like one teacher's admonition not to copy when Paul reproduces a Kandinsky he saw at the Guggenheim from memory, and another's gentler but no less prescriptive prompt, after Paul's creative work doesn't follow the brief, that he do the assignment. Signing the work for Gray, who has long been fascinated by the tension between the weight of Old World family ties and the seductive levity of contemporary life, means carefully tracking his fictional surrogate family's cross-generational assimilation into Ronald Reagan's America, which he proposes happened not just in the shadow of ghouls like Fred and Maryanne Trump (played here by Jessica Chastain)--donors at Gray's and Paul's private school--but, more insidiously, through American Jews' growing proximity to whiteness. Suffused with Gray's typical tragic grandeur and rich thematic preoccupation with the uniquely American compulsion to recreate oneself as a blank slate despite one's inescapable background, that signature is nevertheless a bit fainter than usual here, owing to the off-the-rack genre elements of the artist's coming-of-age narrative and a still-developing protagonist who, by film's end, remains too opaque to leave his mark as either an artist or an authorial surrogate.

Far from the Madding Cloud: An Interview with Iuli Gerbase

I first caught Iuli Gerbase's fantastic debut The Pink Cloud as part of last year's virtual Sundance and came away from it feeling like I'd seen perhaps the definitive film of the pandemic. But it wasn't a pandemic movie, per se. It was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, meaning its story of two people negotiating isolation is engaged in unpacking a different kind of virulence. The script was completed post-Trump but pre-Bolsonaro, so this Brazilian film isn't even exactly a political metaphor, although it could certainly be read that way. While it's good, publicity-wise, for The Pink Cloud to seem a work of prescience, it's bad in that the picture's prescience detracts from the thorniness of its broader sociological themes. Given time, its embedded subtext concerning a patriarchal system reinforcing traditional gender roles should emerge as the novelty of it as the world's grimmest Magic 8-ball recedes.

TIFF '21: Wrap-up

by Bill Chambers I've been covering TIFF for, gulp, 25 years now. If I didn't expect to mark this silver anniversary in the confines of my living room, I have no complaints. Some of the show ponies were geoblocked for Canadian press or offline altogether, but although I'm fully vaccinated, I wasn't about to risk transmission or stew for hours in a mask to see the May-December romance Dear Evan Hansen, or another remake of Dune, or a Secret Steven Soderbergh Screening that turned out to be, lol, Kafka, which is almost as good a prank as moving Best Actor to the end of the Academy Awards ceremony. I did at least get to stream my white whale, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, so no regrets. No regrets, no complaints.

Beckett (2021) - Netflix

*/****
starring John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Filippos Ioannidis
screenplay by Kevin A. Rice
directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It's obvious what Ferdinando Cito Filomarino is after with Beckett: a 1970s paranoia thriller in the Three Days of the Condor vein. And it's just as obvious that he misses the mark. Beckett isn't even a prestige knock-off version à la the Peter Hyams remake of Narrow Margin. Lots of reasons for its failure, chief among them that it doesn't have a point of view; landing somewhere in the junction between a "wrong man" thriller and a film about a truth-seeker finding more truth than he bargained for makes it all seem arbitrary. To be clear, not arbitrary in the sense that what's happening to our heroes is meaningless (a capricious universe is the fodder, after all, for great paranoia)--arbitrary in the sense that the film itself has no real reason for being, and that's a hurdle very little art can overcome. It's a hurdle that not even great cinematography (by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) and a Ryuichi Sakamoto score can ameliorate. Instead, they underscore how top-heavy it all is. Great cast, too, scenic locales--everything top of the line. But there's nothing mooring it to relevance, despite all its arched-eyebrow pipe-smoking about the state of Greece and American interventionism.

Sundance '21: The Pink Cloud

A Nuvem Rosa
***½/****
starring Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça, Helena Becker, Girley Paes
written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

by Walter Chaw Iuli Gerbase's stunning feature debut The Pink Cloud owes a great deal to the insular psychodramas of J.G. Ballard, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a more specific High Rise in which the fall of society is focused through the decay of a relationship forged in quarantine. It works best as allegory, allying itself with something like Lorcan Finnegan's recent and similarly-pre-pandemic Vivarium, using science-fiction as a launch point to test the tensile strength of the tenterhooks tethering us to one another. The details of the corruption matter less than how we change when our environment changes--or, more specifically, how we fail to.

Sundance '20: Once Upon a Time in Venezuala

*/****
directed by Anabel Rodríguez Ríos

by Walter Chaw My favourite part of Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's pretty documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela isn't the mad woman who has a shrine to Hugo Chavez and forces people to touch a giant, door-sized poster of him before entering her room, nor is it the two old men who cry while talking about the way things used to be in their little floating/stilts-bound town of Congo Mirador before playing pointed tunes on an old rat-box guitar. No, my favourite part of Once Upon a Time in Venezuela is how it's loosely structured around a doomed election that has no real bearing on this tiny place's inevitable disintegration. There's a lot to pull from this idea that the works of Man are but a speck of dust and all that--a mote in God's design, right? Some of the locals, especially one garish busybody, are also displeased with the quality of education their children are receiving while the world falls apart around them. It's fun to watch people without a future try to plan for the future. And then you realize the film is talking about us.

Ad Astra (2019)

**/****
starring Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones
written by James Gray & Ethan Gross
directed by James Gray

by Walter Chaw James Gray's Ad Astra is the sort of movie people who don't like Terrence Malick think Terrence Malick movies are like. It's overwritten to the point of self-parody in some places (consider a scene aboard a Mars-bound shuttle where our hero's patrilineage is mentioned, reacted to, discussed at length, and then brought up again), with a voiceover that doesn't invite introspection so much as comparisons to Harrison Ford's reluctant Blade Runner exposition. Imagine the version of this film with about a quarter of the lengthy chit-chat--or even one that doesn't mistrust its lead's performance so much that a scene where he's acting out his betrayal isn't underscored with narration: "Goddamnit, they're using me!" It's such a handsome film, with cinematography by Interstellar's Hoyte van Hoytema, that one is inclined to forgive this second consecutive attempt by Gray to make Apocalypse Now, except that it plays unforgivably like a "For Dummies" version of an ecstatic picture. Imagine the Carlos Reygadas version, or the Peter Strickland one (Ad Astra most resembles a super-chatty Berberian Sound Studio). Or just watch the Claire Denis version, High Life, which asks many of the same big questions as Ad Astra without asking them explicitly. Nor trying to answer them.

BHFF '18: The Cannibal Club

O Clube dos Canibais
***/****
starring Ana Luiza Rios, Tavinho Teixeira, Zé Maria, Pedro Domingues
written and directed by Guto Parente

by Walter Chaw Guto Parente's The Cannibal Club is satire served grisly, sexy, slick, and unsubtle, an update in theme if not form of Paul Bartel's still-unsurpassed Eating Raoul--a fable of the class struggle eternal as the 1% literally feeds, as it is wont to do, on the other 99. The more things change, and all that; it's instructive to revisit Eating Raoul's opening narration about Hollywood, which seems to apply equally to every group of monkeys in pants: "Here sex hunger is reflected in every aspect of daily life...where random vice and amorality permeate every strata of society, and the barrier between food and sex has totally dissolved." For Parente, Bartel's murderous--and eventually cannibalistic--marrieds the Blands are Gilda and Otavio (Ana Luiza Rios and Tavinho Teixeira), a rich couple living on a sprawling estate in Fortaleza, Brazil, who go through an alarming number of low-income workers together. The young men are provided by an employment agency, seduced by the lady of the house, and at the moment of climax, murdered by Otavio (who's been jerking off in the wings), butchered, then eaten. Otavio is also a member of the titular club, where the hoi polloi of Brazilian corporate culture gathers to watch a graphic sex show that ends in the murder of the chained couple, who are then, likewise, served up in the Brazilian fashion: on skewers, shaved at the table. There's a hint of Peter Greenaway in that.

TIFF '17: Motorrad

**/****
screenplay by L.G. Bayão
directed by Vincente Amorim

by Bill Chambers There is a whole subtext, nay, context begging to be unpacked in Motorrad, yet the filmmaking never inspires much curiosity about it, and it's all too easy to substitute the legacy of George Miller's Mad Max movies for table-setting. Shaggy Hugo (Guilherme Prates) breaks into a seemingly-abandoned garage and sees a carburetor he would like. The proprietor chases him with a shotgun, but an alluring, tomboyish woman (Carla Salle) intervenes, like the farmer's daughter convincing daddy not to shoot the stranger climbing out her bedroom window. Instead, they brand Hugo, which is curiously obfuscated by elliptical cutting for how meaningful it becomes later on. Hugo rushes off to install his new carburetor and meet up with older brother Ricardo (Emílio de Mello), the leader of a makeshift motorcycle gang that seems pretty wholesome, even though they act like having someone slightly younger in Hugo tag along is cramping their style. At the same time, they seem like people at once liberated from the shackles of society and bound by the rules of a new world order forcing Man out onto the open road, and so their joy-riding inspires a certain amount of dread even before bikers in identity-obscuring masks show up to turn Motorrad into The Hills Have Eyes. Still, I know of at least one individual inured to the slow-burn of slasher cinema who gave up on it well before the machetes were drawn, and I can't say I really blame him. Our heroes are all sandy blondes whose names are their defining traits--only puppyish Vincent, the "farmer's daughter" (who resurfaces on the trail, possibly as bait), and the token girlfriend in the gang (Juliana Lohmann) inspire a measure of attachment, by virtue of sticking out like sore thumbs physically. That the killers are equally albeit literally faceless suggests commentary of a sort, but also a deep cynicism; the violence in the film is vicious because it has to be to make an impact. But stunt coordinator Javier Lambert, an old pro who got his start on Licence to Kill, devises some white-knuckle motorcycle chases, and director Vicente Amorim deserves credit for both capturing a Brazil unfamiliar to filmgoers (Kubrick-like, he finds the wasteland in his notoriously verdant backyard) and rushing headlong towards an existential finish, even if it feels like he just ran out of gas. Programme: Contemporary World Cinema

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) + This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) - DVDs

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo Lima, Valeria Vasquez
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Roque Rodrigues, Nadia Freitas, William Morgan
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

by Alice Stoehr Zé do Caixão, known to English-speaking audiences as Coffin Joe, is like Mr. Hyde without a Dr. Jekyll. Although nominally a small-town undertaker, he has the mien and rap sheet of a supervillain. Attired in top hat and cape, he stalks the countryside, bent on perpetuating his bloodline. He luxuriates in his own depravity. He's a horror-movie monster, and he loves it. Joe is the brainchild of Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins, who's been playing the role for decades. He introduced the character back in the 1960s with a pair of colourfully-titled films: At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul and, three years later, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse. Both of those phrases are threats spoken onscreen by Joe's victims; both hint at ghostly mischief and a lurid tone. Unhindered by understatement, these films dispense atrocities at the rate of about one per reel. Joe's first evil act, mere minutes into Soul, is blasphemy: he spends Good Friday noshing on a leg of lamb--an unthinkable sin to his pious Catholic neighbours--then, like a schoolyard bully, forces an unwilling bystander to take a bite. Further iniquities pile up quickly in the form of bullwhipping, blinding, and immolation. When an elder dares to challenge him, Joe lacerates the man's face with a Christ figurine's crown of thorns.

Brazilian Western (2013) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Faroeste caboclo
**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Felipe Abib, Antonio Calloni, César Troncoso, Marcos Paulo
screenplay by Marcos Bernstein and Victor Atherino
directed by René Sampaio

by Jefferson Robbins If a few things fall too neatly into place in René Sampaio's Brazilian Western--like beautiful Maria Lúcia (Isis Valverde) jumping into bed with fugitive João (Fabrício Boliveira), who just held her at gunpoint in her own bedroom--well, it's a fable. That's meant literally, since the film is adapted from a megahit ballad of roughly the same name: Legāio Urbana's nine-minute barn-burner of calamity, bloodshed, love, and redemption spoke to something in the Brazilian psyche in 1987, charting João de Santo Christo's fatal misadventures with the corrupt forces that kept a boot on the underclass. Sampaio's adaptation has a lot to live up to in that respect, as well as in honouring the western genre to which the title nods. It winds up a Leone-ian Scarface of sorts, although the stakes are different--pot instead of coke, infatuation rather than the will to power, with imbalances of class and race at the forefront.

Neighbouring Sounds (2013)

O som ao redor
***½/****
starring Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings, W.J. Solha, Irma Brown
written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

by Angelo Muredda In his 1975 survey of trends in Canadian literature, Northrop Frye famously diagnosed the national character as paranoiac, fraught with nightmares about being invaded by the outside world. That so-called garrison mentality, Frye offered, meant early white Canadian settlers bonded together against both the malevolent nature past their forts and the more generalized outside threats it represented--shutting their doors to anyone who seemed the slightest bit unneighbourly. Although Frye had a very specific community in mind, it's hard not to see it reflected in the gated neighbourhood of critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighbouring Sounds, a conclave of middle-class northern Brazilian condo-dwellers who define themselves by the riffraff they discard, whether car-stereo thieves or sleeping doormen. Part-Hanekian surveillance thriller and part-Altmanesque ensemble of overlapping voices, it's one of the most assured debut features to land in years, the sort of fully-formed high-concept work you expect after a couple of interesting misfires.

Elite Squad - The Enemy Within (2010)

Tropa de Elite 2 - O Inimigo Agora É Outro
***/****
starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha
directed by José Padilha

by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad - The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha's blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil's answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It's a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody's-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it's the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one's pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.

Anaconda (1997) - Blu-ray Disc

**½/**** Image B- Sound B-
starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz
screenplay by Hans Bauer and Jim Cash & Jack Epps, Jr.
directed by Luis Llosa

by Walter Chaw Almost worth it just for Jon Voight's post-regurgitation wink, Luis Llosa's B-movie creature-feature Anaconda is a deadpan riff on the nature-amuck flicks of the mid-Seventies in general and Steven Spielberg's Jaws in particular. (Cinematographer Bill Butler shot both films.) It borrows the Moby Dick conceit of a mad hunter forcing a hapless crew to take a personal vision quest against an aquatic foe and post-modernizes it with a passel of genre in-references, an unusually dry script, and a supporting cast of accomplished character actors. The only real failure of the film in respect to its modest aspirations, in fact, is the snake itself, a frankly awful CGI phantom that destroys the tension with its every appearance. It's hard to be afraid of a glorified screen-saver.

Blindness (2008) + Eagle Eye (2008)

BLINDNESS
*/****
starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Gael García Bernal
screenplay by Don McKellar, based on the novel by José Saramago
directed by Fernando Meirelles

EAGLE EYE
½*/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Billy Bob Thornton
screenplay by John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright and Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott
directed by D.J. Caruso

by Walter Chaw Brazilian wunderkind Fernando Meirelles has the one-trick pony and he's beaten its corpse for all the slickefied, electrified, vaguely exploitive prestige pieces he's made his calling card since City of God exploded into the loving arms of the arthouse. His latest, Blindness, feels like just another stroll down the same moralizing path as the residents of some generic city go blind, with only the bleary, red-rimmed eyes of Julianne Moore left as the moral barometer and literal/spiritual guide. And like his stable of reliable steeds, Blindness reveals itself at the end as having nothing much to say beyond the Lord of the Flies truism that men left to their own devices are no better than animals. Moore's an unnamed dingbat housewife fond of drinking a little too much wine and tittering around the limited orbit of her optometrist husband (Mark Ruffalo). When The Doctor (none of the characters have names, because the movie is profound) encounters a Patient (Yusuke Iseya) who has gone spontaneously blind, it's not long before the typical end-of-times plague starts the high-concept hullabaloo in earnest. Soon, The Doctor and The Wife find themselves in the Spooky Deserted Hospital that The City uses as The Quarantine Ward, though more literary-minded viewers will choose to refer to it as The Microcosm.

Only Human (2004) + House of Sand (2005)

Seres queridos
**/****
starring Guillermo Toledo, Marián Aguilera, María Botto, Fernando Ramallo
written and directed by Dominic Harari & Teresa Pelegri

Casa de Areia
***½/****
starring Fernanda Montenegro, Fernanda Torres, Ruy Guerra, Seu Jorge
screenplay by Elena Soárez
directed by Andrucha Waddington

by Walter Chaw Married hyphenates Dominic Harari and Teresi Pelegri craft a screwball comedy (which has the audacity to end with the final line of Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot) about what happens when good Jewish girl Leni (Marián Aguilera) brings Palestinian nebbish boyfriend Rafi (Guillermo Toledo) home to meet her My Big Fat Greek Wedding ethnic cartoon family. There's the blind, rifle-toting old fossil fond of recounting his days of potting Arabs along the Gaza strip; the short, hysterical Jewish mother; the slutty older sister who only fucks anything with a dick because mama loved little sister more; the younger brother who's newly fanatical about the Koran and the observance of the Jewish Sabbath; and the niece who's a monster because, well, who wouldn't be in that household? Discomfort turns into farce when Rafi drops a cube of frozen soup out a window, killing someone who might be Leni's father (said father later mistaking a black prostitute for Leni's mother)--this event also leading to the discovery that Leni's mother has never had an orgasm and the tableaux homorte where grandpa is caught groping Rafi during a trip to the loo.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

***/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, Mía Maestro, Mercedes Morán
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the books Notas de viaje by Ernesto Guevara and Con el Che por America Latina by Alberto Granado
directed by Walter Salles

by Walter Chaw Adapting respective memoirs by then-young Cuban-by-way-of-Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara (Gael García Bernal) and his best friend Alberto Granado (Rodrigo De la Serna) that documented their Kerouac-ian odyssey down the spine of South America to find the soul of their country, Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries is difficult at best. It's a road movie and a good one, as far as it goes, but it lacks the fire of change of something like Easy Rider in its substitution of a picaresque travelogue lightly spiced with delightful romantic misunderstandings for Peter Fonda's swiftly tilting planet and deserts of the real. Easy Rider talks about the dying of the light; The Motorcycle Diaries talks about how doe-eyed Ernesto Guevara became Ché, the Hoffa of Latin America and eventually the most reproduced and mass-marketed image since Marilyn Monroe's.

Carandiru (2003)

*/****
starring Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, Milton Gonçalves, Ivan de Almeida, Ailton Graça
screenplay by Hector Babenco, Fernando Bonassi, Victor Navas, based on the book Estação Carandiru by Dráuzio Varella
directed by Hector Babenco

by Walter Chaw Argentine director Hector Babenco's ninth film, Carandiru is his fourth that, at least in an ancillary fashion, has something to do with prison (the others being Lució Flávio, Pixote, and Kiss of the Spider Woman), and it's easily the least of them, justifying the men-behind-bars tropes and queen stereotypes by hiding behind its ostensible basis in Dráuzio Varella's non-fiction fiction. The film was adapted from a book that is based on a true story, the degrees of separation from reality dramatic enough as to render its hero doctor a smirking, condescending Virgil in a stock Inferno peopled with an all-too familiar panoply: smart con; murderous con who finds God; artistic elderly con; brutal street con; possibly innocent naïf con; philosophical con; and so on into nausea. The picture makes mistakes early and often, deciding to condense hundreds of stories into a few basic sketches and then choosing to recreate each of the pastiche criminal's life story in vignette flashbacks that do more to celebrate the brassy hedonism of São Paulo than underscore its underbelly of desperation and criminality. That carnival atmosphere comes off as a fragrant bouquet of patronizing pap that revels in its sordidness yet feels curiously naïve--"Oz" by a creative team that doesn't appear to know that the bar on prison dramas has been raised since Brute Force.

TIFF '03: Bus 174

****/****
directed by José Padilha

by Bill Chambers Bus 174 sums up its own trumping of the devious City of God with a quote from Sandro do Nascimento, the hostage-taker who becomes the focal point of this absorbing, even-handed documentary: "This ain't no American movie!" Presumed to be on a cocaine bender as he holds the passengers of a Rio city bus at gunpoint, his irrational demands amounting to more firearms (he asks police for "a rifle and a grenade"), Sandro is almost impossible for special forces to psychologically profile: he lets a student go to prevent him from being late for class but refuses to relinquish a woman in the throes of a stroke. Director José Padilha attempts to retrace the escalating misfortunes that led to Sandro's tragic June 12^th, 2000 hijacking; the tranquility of those aerial vistas to which Padilha crosscuts underscores just how Brazil's street kids--among whom Sandro roamed--earned their nickname "The Invisibles," so deflective is the candy-coated surface of this tourist town. At once an overview of the crime-poverty cycle (Sandro's pregnant mother was murdered, orphaning him to the life responsible for her demise), a discomforting police procedural, and a re-sensitization to action-movie tropes, Bus 174 is one of the most thoughtful films of 2003, an incredibly sensitive account of a situation that should never have transpired and probably will again in some form, to be as fatalistic as the filmmakers about it. Programme: National Cinema Spotlight

City of God (2002)

Cidade de Deus
**/****
starring Matheus Nachtergaele, Seu Jorge, Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora
screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani, based on the novel by Paulo Lins
directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund

by Walter Chaw I'm uncomfortable with Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God--not for its brutality, but for the slick cinematic treatment of that brutality as it manifests itself through the harsh realities of Brazil's favelas ("slums"). Social Darwinist and serio-mythic in equal queasy measure, the picture is more influenced by Tarantino than Meirelles's background in commercial and video filmmaking, finding itself trying to balance its sizzle with social conscience before choosing in the end to remove itself as a strict adaptation of Paulo Lins's book Cidade de Deus. That being said, Meirelles does a magnificent job of parceling out--of marketing--the key touchstones in the history of a slum seething with violence. The result is a film that suggests what it might be like if Guy Ritchie helmed The Pianist--kinetically intriguing and technically proficient, but deeply troubling for its pop sensibility.