In terms of movie-making, there's nothing like it.

Rating: 9/10 (14 July 2010)

City of God (2002)
A broiling, gruesome, vivid, unforgiving submersion in the drug and crime world of a Rio de Janeiro barrio. You want to just say wow wow wow, it's so violent and awful, and yet the filming and acting, wow again, it's virtuosic and artful. On that most visceral level, there is no faulting a film with this kind of cinematic integrity.
Questions start to rise by the last hour, however. In terms of the subject, you wonder, could it be so? Is life so apparently run by children with guns? Where are the older thugs, where are all the kids who aren't criminals, on and on? You come to realize this is a hugely partial view. That's okay, for sure--it's a movie--but it then draws attention to its own need for violence. You will never see so many people ruthlessly, heartlessly, even laughingly murdered, point blank, by children, on and on and on. This makes the movie awesome and awful, both. As a narrative story, it needs, it demands, greater complexity, and maybe, even if it's basically fiction, greater truth.
On this level, the movie begins to depend on its energy to succeed. It has energy to spare, for sure, both in the acting, and in the camera-work, both of which are nothing short of unbelievable. But there is a lack, oddly enough with all these "types" of young men and boys, of actual "character." Where is some sense of the psychology behind so many of these people. Yes, the mood, the interactions, the scenes taken whole, the groups and even the confrontations leading (usually) to murder, all are filled with human depth. But the individuals seem largely to be types of people, not digging into their motivations and their inner states of mine. Maybe that's asking too much.
I've seen the movie twice now, and twice I got anxious half way through because it was mostly kinetics and film-making on crack. And it really is astonishing stuff. But as with Slumdog Millionaire, the fractured and imaginative mise-en-scenes would mean so much more with deeper understanding of the human elements involved.
A masterpiece, with some large chinks in its armor.