The Screengrab : city of god

Oh Say Can You See: The "Blindness" Controversy

Phil Nugent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hot on the heels of the great Tropic Thunder/"retard" controversy come reports that groups for the unsighted are angry about the new movie Blindness, with the National Federation for the Blind planning protests when the film opens in theaters tomorrow. The movie, which was directed by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian whiz kid responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener, is a dystopian fantasy that depicts the effects of an epidemic that sweeps through a large city, rendering its inhabitants blind. It stars Julianne Moore as a woman who doesn't go blind but pretends that she has so that she can remain with her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, when he and others who have been stricken are quarantined. The city is unnamed --the movie was shot principally in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with additional shooting in parts of Canada and Uruguay--and the characters have names like "The Doctor", "The Doctor's Wife", "The Thief", "The Accountant", and "Woman with Dark Glasses." Those capable of taking a hint might conclude that the film is intended as an allegory with symbolic characters, but when representatives of the NFB attended a preview, all they saw--or heard, and had described to them or something--was a major motion picture in which a bunch of people who instantly and mysteriously lose their sight insist on taking a glass-half-empty attitude about it. Christopher Danielson, a spokesman for the 50,000-member NFB, says that the blind "face a 70 percent unemployment rate and other social problems because people don't think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all." For instance, the movie includes images of people who are struck blind while driving, with unfortunate results. The NFB seems to feel that if anyone who sees Blindness comes away less inclined to hire someone who can't see as a bus driver, then Fernando Meirelles and Miramax will have a lot to answer for.

Nothing if not artistically ambitious, Blindness was adapted by screenwriter Don McKellar (who also acts in the movie) from the highly praised 1995 novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago. (Saramago, who has described his book as "an allegory about the fragility of civilization", apparently took a great deal of convincing to sell the movie rights to anyone, and turned down the first offer he got from Meirelles, as well as an offer from Gael Garcia Bernal, who wound up playing the pivotal role of "the King of Ward 3.") So far, the movie hasn't been able to live up to the book's level of acclaim. It bombed at Cannes last spring and inspired walkouts when it was shown at the more recent Toronto Film Festival. Responding to criticisms, Meirelles has done considerable tinkering with it for its theatrical release, eliminating a voice-over narration and trimming a scene of "sexual violence" that set off the smoke alarms at Toronto. But there's not much he can do to placate the complaints from blind groups, which are grounded in a basic objection to the concept itself. Marc Maurer, the president of the NFB, has said that "The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," adding, "“The National Federation of the Blind condemns and deplores this film, which will do substantial harm to the blind of America and the world. Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved. They are unable to do even the simplest things like dressing, bathing, and finding the bathroom. The truth is that blind people regularly do all of the same things that sighted people do." Including, it seems, look for reasons to get their noses out of joint over a movie.

DVD Digest for July 1, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, one of the great writers of the twentieth century gets some Criterion love, plus plenty of Blu-Ray releases to last for the rest of the summer.

DVD of the Week: Continuing Criterion’s summer of awesomeness this week is the release of two films that function as a primer for anyone curious about the life and work of Japanese author Yukio Mishima. To begin with, there’s the new special edition of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader’s greatest directorial achievement to date. Rather than attempting to take on Mishima’s life in a conventional manner, Schrader begins on the final day of the writer’s life, as he and his private army take control of a military compound so that Mishima can commit ritualized suicide. This framing device is intercut with stark re-creations of Mishima’s early life, as well as lush Technicolor dramatizations of several of his stories. Mishima is a gorgeous film, but it’s also more insightful about its protagonist’s one-of-a-kind life than any straightforward telling could hope to be. For more insight into Mishima, Criterion is releasing separately the author’s rarely-seen directorial effort, Patriotism, which not only starred Mishima in the lead role but also anticipated his own suicide. Anyone looking to learn more about Yukio Mishima could do a lot worse than to start with these two must-see DVDs.

This week’s recent releases coming to DVD: Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor (Paramount, also Blu-Ray); The 24-meets-Rashomon thriller Vantage Point (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Wong Kar-wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Nights (Genius); the City of God quasi-sequel City of Men (Disney); and the direct-to-DVD spinoff Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control (Warner, also Blu-Ray). This week’s TV-on-DVD releases include Mad Men Season 1 (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) and The Closer: The Complete Third Season (Warner).

Finally, in Blu-Ray-only news, this week brings Batman: The Movie Special Edition (Fox), Gangs of New York (Disney), In the Line of Fire (Sony), and Point Break: Special Edition (Fox).

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Elite Squad"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I may have dosed off for a few minutes while watching the hammerhead Brazilian police drama Elite Squad. Listening to all that screaming and cursing and the sound of gunshots--it was just so much like being at home in my bed in the Bronx. A scandalous success in its native Brazil, Elite Squad is the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with fewer washed-up rock stars. Based on a book about Rio's special forces outfit known as BOPE, the movie is narrated by squad Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the hardest of hard men, who is looking for someone tough enough to replace him so that he retire and stop placing his life on the line and raise a proper family with his pregnant wife. Moura thinks there may be potential in a couple of young recruits, who also happen to be bestest buddies: Neto (Caio Junqueira), who seems tough and trigger-happy enough but is maybe just a teensy bit too Cro-Magnon to be trusted with large arsenals of weapons at his disposal, and Matias (Andre' Ramiro), who wears glasses and is smart and stuff, but may be too evolved to keep the savages in line. How to choose!? Faced with this head-scratcher, Moura addresses it the only way a real man can: he yells at everybody who comes within a mile of his office until you expect his throat to hemorrage. Then he takes to the training field to figure out which recruits have what it takes, by the time-tested method of yelling at them. Then, having used his famous leather lungs to keep Rio from cracking apart, he goes home to enjoy a relaxed evening of yelling at his wife. We must remain ever vigilant.

Elite Squad is the first nondocumentary film directed by Jose' Padilha, who made the great Bus 174, and coming from him, it's a shock. That movie used a hostage situation that was covered on Brazilian TV for an amazing, multi-level view of Rio society, and it had a great deal of sympathetic understanding for confused, poverty-stricken young men who resort to the gun. Elite Squad is made from deep inside the viewpoint of the kind of paranoid, killer cop who sees everyone who's not in uniform as a potential threat to his life. Its take on policing the Rio slums and discos is, the drug dealers are too heavily armed to be kept in line by regular means, and all the regular cops are on the take anyway, so blah-blah-blah and let God sort it out. (Roberto Pimental, the former BOPA captain who co-wrote the book on which the movie is based and had a hand in the screenplay, has been quoted as saying that the movie that came closest to capturing his experiences as a policeman is Black Hawk Down.) Padilha has indicated that he thought he was making an expose' about reprehensible behavior among violent cops, and there are times when the captain's narration and behavior are so puerile that it would be very reassuring to think that the filmmakers included them as evidence that their hero is a psychotic asshole. (He brags about the "Elite Squad"'s logo--a skewered skull that a fourteen-year-old would think was rad--and tortures the recruits with abusive games and taunts that would make R. Lee Ermey consider staging an intervention.) The script that Pahilha and Pimental came up with was reshaped and polished by Braulio Mantovani, and Padilha may not have recognized the degree to which Mantovani, the writer of City of God, gave it the structure and devices of a conventional righteous-cop revenge thriller, with the cops doing horrible, omni-destructive things only after the bad guys have made it clear that they're such total monsters that it'll take the worst of which the cops are capable to bring them down. The whiff of mixed motives behind the camera gives Elite Squad whatever fascination it has, but the commercial success it's already enjoyed, and any great success it ultimately has in this country, probably comes down to how much of the audience is happy to take its supercop characters' vicious self-righteousness as real heroism.

Screengrab Review: City of Men

Peter Smith — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Review by Bryan Whitefield.

When City of God was released in 2002, it became an international sensation for its mix of stylized violence and gritty portrayal of life in the Brazilian favelas. It launched the career of director Fernando Mereilles, who used the same location and several of the non-professional actors from the film to create an episodic series for Brazilian TV called City of Men.

The show was much more light-hearted than the original film, following the day-to-day exploits of lovable teenagers Acerola and Laranjinha whose various schemes ranged from selling popsicles to losing their virginity. Capturing a more hopeful spirit while never turning a blind eye to violence and harsh conditions, the show also gave audiences a chance to watch the two boys literally grow up on camera. In many ways it covered similar territory to season four of HBO's The Wire — kids living under difficult circumstances with no guidance, failed by social institutions and finding an alternative in community-minded drug dealers who at least offer a path to money and mobility.

The film City of Men was written and directed by Paolo Morelli, who helmed several of the show's episodes, and maintains the show's looseness and vibrancy, highlighting the contradiction between Brazil's incredible beauty and nearly unimaginable poverty, crime and violence. Picking up where the show left off, we find the two friends forced to face an early adulthood. Acerola is now a father himself, while Laranjinha is consumed with uncovering the identity of the father he never knew. Because of the dire conditions that surround them, the story has a built-in drama and the characters are forced into difficult, even critical decisions. The movie plays more like a series finale than a stand-alone feature, but if it leads viewers back to the consistently excellent television series, it's valuable even just as an advertisement. — Bryan Whitefield