The Screengrab : elite squad

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

"In Reality, It's Actually Worse": Defending 'Elite Squad'

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT

When José Padilha made Bus 174, he was praised by many critics as having created a documentary that treated the poverty, addiction, desperation and corruption in Brazil's favela slums with exceptional sensitivity and care. Now, a few years later, after his film Elite Squad (a narrative film that was originally meant to be a documentary) has become the most expensive -- and most profitable -- film in Brazilian cinema history, a lot of the same critics are calling him a quasi-fascist.

What happened?

In a revealing interview with the Guardian, Padilha -- alternating between defensive hostility and sincere pleading -- makes the case that whatever people think of Elite Squad, it does nothing but portray the everyday reality he set out to film. The story of Bope, a police special forces unit that goes after Brazilian drug dealers and street gangs with the same murderous brutality with which the gangs go after each other, is so naked and unrelenting in its portrayal of the deadliest police killers since Cobra that it's easy to imagine the director meant it as an ode to oppression. And his star, Wagner Moura, is so charismatic it's hard not to read his bloodthirsty, enthusiastically torturing Captain Nasciemento as a hero.

But that's too shallow a read, according to the filmmaker. He insists he set out to make nothing more than a documentary (though the relentless voice-overs don't do much to banish a partisan mood), and if people respond to the brutality of the film, they're responding to the brutality of a system they helped create. While some of his defenses ring a bit hollow (such as his Nixonian claim that critics who attack his film are dope-addled intellectuals unaware that they're part of the problem) and his omission of the fact that Bope has been implicated in the murder of impoverished favela residents not involved in the drug trade is rather damning, he does make good points about how Nasciemento's popularity is understandable in a country that has done little to make its citizens feel safe, and some of his depictions of institutional dysfunction echo those of The Wire, a show few would attack as fascist.

Whatever one's read on the film's politics, it's extremely telling that, whie Padilha condems people who rail against the system while continuing to feed it, he admits that in order to facilitate filming in the favelas, he paid two sets of bribes: one to the neighborhood gangs not to attack him or his crew, and one to the neighborhood cops not to disrupt filming.

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.

Scandal, Awards at Berlinale

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The jury prizes for the recently-concluded Berlin Film Festival have been announced, and this year's Golden Bear Winner is unpopular, to say the least. The jury's choice for best film, José Padilha's Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), deemed by critic Dennis Lim "a violent, cop's-eye view of Rio's favela drug wars that registers more as glorification of the fighting than as critique," has become the center of a wave of controversy. The film is the fiction debut of Bus 174 director Padilha, and much of the controversy has stemmed not from the film itself, but from its being awarded the top prize over more popular titles such as Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Filmbrain has even gone so far as to suggest that the Golden Bear was bought by the film's distributor, Harvey Weinstein. It's true Elite was one of the worst-reviewed films in competition — many critics have called it "fascist," making it a strange film for a Costa-Gavras-led jury to get behind, no? However, the idea that it was paid for seems a little far-fetched to me. But what do I know? I wasn't there.

Other prizes from the Berlinale:
Jury Grand Prix- Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris)
Silver Bear, Best Director- Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Silver Bear, Best Actress- Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky
Silver Bear, Best Actor- Reza Najie, The Song of Sparrows
Silver Bear, Best Script- In Love We Trust (Wang Xiaoshuai)
Alfred Bauer Prize- Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke)
10th Panorama Audience Award- Lemon Tree (Eran Riklis)

Source: GreenCine Daily.