Ray Pride

Brazilian director Fernando Meirielles made a lot of commercials and co-directed a couple of kids films before taking on "City of God," an adaptation of Paulo Lins' novel, a fictionalization of the author's youthful experience surviving the favelas (slums) outside of Rio de Janeiro. Indelibly fun to watch, "City of God" is a self-mythologizing portrait of the allure and despair of juvenile crime in a milieu that offers no other escape. Does the subject matter deserve a less psychedelic approach than Meirielles and his collaborators have taken? Is the movie mere gloss, "Pixote" on speed, fever-dream Tarantino, epic blaxploitation? It's a lot more--dizzying, dazzling, never flinching from the harshness of what its many characters go through in the tale's three samba-and-pop-drenched decades of speakable horror. Complicated, bloody, humid, lurid, flashy, inspired and terrifying, Meirelles' movie may reach its emotional height when a gang of children, known as the Runts, armed with pistols from one of several warring drug lords in the favela, recruit even younger children at gunpoint. What happens next is terrible, gut wrenching and so much more honest about the origins and results of youth violence than our own filmmakers seem willing to be, or their financiers care to be. It's the kind of art that genuinely confronts the question, what is the value of human life? And why are we so reckless with the fate of the youth of the world?

"City of God" opens Friday.

(2003-01-22)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Thirty-two-year-old Jae-eun Jeong is one of South Korea's few female directors, and her coming-of-age story about five young women in the working-class port city of Inchon struggling against life after high school is a tender delight.
(2003-01-15)

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This week's limited release movies.
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Documentaries are tough enough to finance, even when they're not about a group of young people who bombed the U.S. Capitol.
(2003-01-15)

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(2003-01-10)

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(2003-01-08)

DVD Tip of the Week
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DVD Tip of the Week
(2003-01-02)

Playing by fear
(2003-01-02)

Tip of the Week
(2002-12-26)

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(2002-12-26)

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