City of God

City of God, 2002
City of God



I had this moving sitting on my coffee table for three or four days, it was just kind of there and if it could talk it would have badgered me the entire time to stop putting it off and just finally watch it. I did end up putting it off until the last possible day, remember I have to have the entire weeks worth of movies with the write ups posted every Tuesday by 5 PM. I know, it's kind of like, "Ugh these damn rules I made up." I didn't really expect anything good to come from this movie, I thought it was going to feel like a chore when I was watching it.

After having watched the movie:
(Possible spoilers below)

Exactly one week ago I watched Dial M for Murder and after watching it, it was all I wanted to talk about. It's funny now because the movie I wasn't excited about watching, let sit on my coffee table for three or four days is now all I want to talk about. I couldn't agree more with Roger Ebert who called City of God, "One of the best films you'll ever see." This was in no way what I had expected it to be. I expected mediocre cinematography and more of a religious influence overall.

I had not expected such amazing cinematography. To be perfectly honest, I don't usually get too wrapped up in the technical aspect of filmmaking. I've never really been one to get excited about all of the features one camera model can offer in comparison to similar model. Frankly, I find the subject rather dull, but I feel like you can not possibly watch City of God and not bring up the amazing cinematography. This movie was nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar in 2004, but lost to Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I was absolutely blown away by the cinematography, that now I feel like I have to see this other movie (Mast and Commander) to see if in my opinion it really was better than City of God. Right now, I kind of doubt it.

As far as the story, it too was more than I had expected it to be. I feel like it can be a bit of a toss up at times with any foreign film. Some will be very "artsy" and others, like this, will just seem to have so much to offer. It was a bit darker than I expected. Being titled City of God, I expected religion to play a bigger role in the movie and it didn't. I also felt like these actors were really the characters they were playing and that they were forced to live in such a hostile environment, with little chance of escaping it. There were a couple of times during the movie I actually thought to myself, what would I do or how would I escape this situation. A lot of times, my answer was that I would want to hide somewhere and cry, because it was so scary. I think it says a lot when audience members start to put themselves in the characters shoes.

Final thoughts: Since I've finished film school I've been able to work on a hand full of feature films, mostly independent and none that were foreign, but despite geographical boundaries the process of making a movie remains the same. For some people, as you're watching something you can slowly begin to get an idea of what amount of time and energy went into making the movie. This realization seems to begin with epics and soon you can start to pick up on it in sitcoms. I think it's even easier to pick up on with bad movies, and one of my favorite quotes from the commentary of Showgirls.

"Everyone involved in this film, from the writer to the director to the actors, down to the gaffer - everyone involved made the worst possible decision at every possible point. The result is an incredible density of failure." - David Schmader

In this case though, everyone involved made the best possible decision at every point and the result was an amazing product that everyone involved with should be proud to say they worked on.

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