Black Entertainment : City of God

Zulile

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Jun 24, 2007
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This movie is outstanding.

"City of God," somewhat similar to "Gangs of New York," offers the entertainment of dehumanization and senseless, cheap killing. Coming from Brazil, a country more blatantly racist than the U.S., with the largest population of African descendents outside of Africa, "City of God" contains this animal-like behavior within the slums where the majority of people, if they lived in the United States, would be categorized as Black. It hints that there are racial divisions: a few of the lighter-skinned poor folks call darker ones "*******" and there is a true sense that City of God is a Brazilian version of a South African bantustand. But, except for these instances, Meirelles deals less with his country's paranoid obsession with race, color and classification and more with Black ghetto pathology and self-destruction as a fascinating yarn.

The villain, L'il Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), is a very Black, "ugly" man with a broad nose and full lips. Our hero, Rocket, is also very Black with African features and, like L'il Ze, has not had much success with the opposite sex. This failure in the mack-daddy department is a running joke throughout the film and allows the audience to feel both sympathy and pity for Rocket. He chooses to hang with a crowd where he is the only Black person. He loves a White girl who gives him no rhythm but falls for a lighter-skinned Black man who dyes his curly hair blonde. As always here, (and as the long-time hype has gone in Brazil), the way out is to get as White as you can, get with some White folks—because, after all, they have all the houses, wealth and education—and get the hell away from all these shooting, senseless Negroes
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Not for the feint of heart - it is a painful movie.

In "City of God", desperation drives children to acts of outrageous violence, crime appears to be the only option in the moral and economic wasteland of the Brazilian favelas.

about the writer:
Between 1986 and 1996, writer Paolo Lins researched the drug trade within the ironically named Cidade De Dues (City Of God), a 60s housing project where he grew up. The novel, and the fact it was based in, was potent raw material for a film. Screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani, director Fernando Meirelles and co-director Katia Lund have done a remarkable job of bringing this marginalised history and culture of violence to the screen. Meirelles talks of "a movie which was true to the book: filmed from the inside of the favela out."
 

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