Okay.  I'm assuming there comes a time in every moviegoers life that he/she is recommended a film that is one of the "best" films of all time and that it is a must see before you die, that has a IMDB Top 250 rating in the top 10, and just is all around a classic.  Oh yeah, and you come to watch it, and you think it is one of the worst films you have every seen in your life.  City of God was praised so highly by many of my friends that I just had to watch it.  But after viewing, I don't know what the hell I was watching for the past two and a half hours, but what it was not, was an all-time great film.

City of God is the Brazilian cop out of Goodfellas.  Plain and simple.  The film is centered around ignorant and evil people that kill and deal drugs for a lifestyle.  I have no idea what any of the characters' names except for somebody named Rocket.  The story starts out in the childhood of a kid who is surrounded by crime.  Lots of people die in the next twenty years, power is shifted, yada yada yada.  I am one of those people that has a hard time sympathizing with these types of characters.  Even the main protagonist snorts coke and smokes pot.  I mean how are you supposed to go along with that?  Ciudade de Deus has to be one of the worst places in the world.  Hands down.  You can literally shoot a child in broad daylight and not get punished.  I was sickened by this movie.  I still do not know what the filmmakers were trying to convey with this film, but if it was displaying the City of God in Brazil is hell, they succeeded.

I could rant and rant on about how this film sucked, but I don't think anyone will hear it.  I mean this film has a rating of almost 9 at IMDB.  I find that completely astonishing.  Wow.  I don't know, maybe I saw the wrong movie, but if this was it, I think the quality of moviemaking has went down drastically.  I'll admit the cinematagraphy was astonishing and the actors I'm assuming made their roles authentic, but that can't save this film.  Not in a million years.    

I really had to keep myself from turning this movie off.  It was that bad.  I mean it just seemed like someone would get shot, smoking, snorting, killing, you name it.  The only reason I kept this movie on was the fact that one of the characters named Benny was killed at his "going away" party.  This guy was regarded as one of the coolest "hoods" in City of God, yet this guy was a drug dealer, he is fucking the main character's love interest in turn having her leave him, and helps a coke addict keep his craving by having him run errends for him in exchange for coke.  After he was shot, I was like maybe everyone will die at the end of this film.  I would wait for that.

Zero stars out of ****

  

Wow. I disagree 100%. In my opininon it's a masterpiece, and one of my top twenty movies of all time (there's a link to my list in my signature).

I'll definitely elaborate on this later, but right now I need to get ready for school.

I'm with Jacob, Cidade de Deus (City of God) is one the most realistic movie ever made in the movie industry. Its director, Fernando Meireles is one of the most talented director in these present days. This movie in certain way says: Crude reality kills and the blindness kills too!

This movie captured me from the get-go. I won't even start to go into technical detail (I could, you know), but just emphasize how extremely well this film is put together. Wheres Guy questions the sanity of having a protagonist that snorts cocaine, I think this a very strong point the movie makes and is complimentary to its realism. These are the people who populate this city and even the purest of them, and least with fault deals or takes drugs. To discard this film because its main character is flawed in such a small way (given the circumstances) is folly, IMO.

I was completely shocked by these kids and the violence which ruled this hierarchy, and when the movie was over I just wanted to watch it again.

This is the first negative review I think I've ever seen of this film.


TheBoywhocouldfly:

Haha, how very anglophone of you! The rest of the non-English speaking world would probably disagree somewhat, that reading should be confined to books.

Someone mentioned this as one of the worst movies they've ever seen, and rather than discuss it on that thread, I thought I'd just throw up a review on the older thread and comment on why that film is considered to be as good as it is.

City of God places emphasis on a particular piece of storytelling that that majority of the films regarded as great place their emphasis: character. There are a lot of characters in City of God and nearly every single one of them gets their moment in the spotlight. Sure, we don't have a bunch of lovable hoodlums here; nearly all of them are pretty despicable, but where the film begs us to look is at their situation which is covered almost as thoroughly.

There are a few redeemable characters in the film that have relatable qualities. These characters are given some redemption sequences to show that they don't want to be in the situation they're in right before they meet their end. In fact, Shaggy and Benny were both trying to leave to a better life when they are killed.

Really, this film was more about the characters than any kind of plot, which takes a backseat here. He see the lives of the characters unfold little by little, one by one and each follows their individual plot, though those individual plots tie into a larger picture which is more or less the rise and fall of Lil Ze. Our main character, Rocket, is pretty much the observer to all the events in the story; he's the everyman character who tells the story, but it is Lil Ze that the story really revolves around in what gets him his rise to power and what he does wrong to bring himself down. Throughout this, on neither side of the fence, is Rocket, who is just trying to avoid all the gang stuff and get out of the City of God.

This is a film that takes some patience to watch (especially if you don't speak Portuguese and are reading the subtitles -- let me thank my Japanese horror for the experience there), but it uses the convention of showing you the end before reaching back to the beginning, so you wonder about that scene as the lives of the characters unfold. I do find it to be one of the better films out there and definitely worth watching.

I loved City of God, although it was subtitled which usually annoys me i enjoyed the whole film. i think it is right to be rated so highly

What happened to Angelic? After Benny dies she just disappears from the movie.

I missed the ending because my copy keeps freezing but did see Rocket taking a picture of Lil Ze's dead body.

The Angelic and Rocket storyline is a poorly used and misplaced love interest if you can even call it that. In fact City of God may be years ahead of most American films but it is not as good as other foreign films I have seen.

This film suffers from too many characters that we can never imagine connecting with.

I enjoyed it.

the end credits basically have a bunch of pictures from the real events and people the film is based on. After Rocket takes a picture of Ze's body, there's not that much left. The final scene is the kids we saw earlier who were wanting to be the gangsters following in the proverbial footsteps of the characters we just watched for 2 hours sending the message that the City of God doesn't change and the next generation will grow up and replace the hoods we just got rid of.

Never noticed this thread when it started, which is strange cos this is my favourate film.  I admit that there are a lot of charaters but they are just the people Rocket comes into contact with through his journey to get of of the city.  The great thing is what George touched on, nothing changes in the city.  The fact that its based on a real person and acted by local children (not actors) just make it more interesting.  And it's beautifully shot too.

One thing I thought was wild about this one was that the kid who played Rocket actually grew up in the City of God as well. I heard in a commentary that the scene where Rocket is telling the reporter lady about having no hot water, etc., wasn't scripted. In fact, the film was left rolling by accident after a bedroom scene and captured that conversation when the actress was asking the actor about his life there. The director loved the conversation so much that he left it in the film. This is one of those rare movies where they went to great lengths to get authenticity.
I heard that they couldn't film in the actual City of God (watch the movie; you'll know why), but they were in an adjoining community.

Basically to justify poor filmmaking they just dropped off with the main love interest because... Rocket just forgot about the woman he loved forever to become a photographer.

Most of the film was entertaining but it is hard to forgive that based upon the fact that she made the cover but they couldn't be bothered taking a small liberty to add a little more push. Even if they never get together.

Films based on true events always change a thing or two.

Hey George I heard all the actors were/are kids that live in the city and the director had to ask permission from the drug gangs, who were in jail, if they could shoot the movie in the locations.

Wesley, you make a good point, she is on the cover and you know I never really noticed that she dissapeared, I do now though lol.

They set her up for a character arc and then fail to deliver. That is bad filmmaking and storytelling. For me they ruined a truly great film by cheating us out of a major story point based upon the way they built her character.

Well, you can't really apply a standard character arc or plot-points to a lot of foreign- or art-films because a lot them decidedly go against the grain on purpose, failing to live up to a set-up you EXPECT to come, because of authenticity.

In script-writing, if there's a set-up, then there's a pay-off or it doesn't fit. In real life, things don't really work that way, so a lot of directors got interested, in the 60s and 70s in making films that didn't end up the way you expected. The love interest might reject the main character at the 60-minute mark, and in no big climax, because they thought climaxes were a construct of fiction and had no place in real life.

Don't worry, I'm no asking you to like it, I'm just saying that as script-writers it's easy to fall victim to the notion that there's only one kind of structure and one set of rules. And in Hollywood, I guess that's true for the most part.

Think about Clockwork Orange, for instance. There's crazy structure for you.

i just think the girl dissapears because Rocket distances himslef from the slums after the death of Benni and as the story is told from his viewpoint it's just natural that he would see her.  Afterall he gets friendly with a work colleague.

Anyway whatever anyones take on this, I still think it's a brilliant move.