What I Watched -- City of God

I'm not good with movies that are subtitled.  It's an unfortunate truth.  In theory, I love these movies.  English subtitles means the movie is foreign, and foreigners often have much more nuanced, artistic storytelling skills than big Hollywood.  However, I've been so busy lately (define lately: maybe the last five years or so) that I really have a hard time with these movies because I'm always trying to do something else at the same time that I'm watching them.  I lose a lot of the intensity because I'm either missing lines or breaking up the flow to back up the DVD and see what I missed.

So it went with City of God, (trailer), and that's terribly unfortunate, because I should have given it a little more attention.  The titular City of God is a Rio slum lorded over by gangs of drug-dealing kids, which sounds like a bit of a ridiculous premise except that the movie appears to be loosely based on a true story.

There's no question that it's based on a book of the same name by Paulo Lins, who grew up in the slum.  Originally, it was thought that the book chronicled the life a wannabe photographer named Wilson Rodrigues, although the consensus now seems to be that there is no such person; the main character in the book is actually a composite of the author himself and one of his childhood friends who hoped to become a photographer.

Anyway, the story.  Drugs, gangs, kids.  All pretty dark stuff.  But there's one shy, honest kid, nicknamed Rocket, who manages to stay mostly above the fray.  The film opens with Rocket standing in the middle of the street, between a gang and the local police.  Rocket narrates as we flash back to the beginning and find out how he ended up in that position, and what happens to him once we catch back up to the present.

The movie is violent, but not overly so, and not for show; what's more horrifying is seeing what the children do to one another in an effort to gain approval from or prove themselves superior to each other.  That's the stuff that's really troubling.

What took my breath away was the cinematography.  The film is full of sweeping camera shots, freeze frames, slow motion, fast motion - but somehow none of it seems kitschy or unnecessary.  Many of the shots have that fuzzy, washed out quality, the way things would look after you'd spent too much time staring into the Rio sun.  It's really spectacular.

Bottom line: visually stunning, emotionally tough but with enough humor and positivity that I wasn't left feeling drained.