Somehow I made it to the futuristic year of 2010 without ever seeing CITY OF GOD. I don’t know, just one of those things I never got around to, like skydiving or owning a house. But hey, the rest of the world: you were right! This is a good one.
You remember it: Crime in the slums of Rio De Janeiro, etc. The filmatism is frantic: alot of quick edits, handheld cameras, montages with lots of closeups, even some bullet time-esque rotating cameras. Occasionally it’s disorienting (especially since I’m trying to read the subtitles) but I think it’s closer to Scorsese energetic edits than, you know, that slapdash post Michael Bay shit we keep getting. And in contrast with many of that type it’s not slick or digital, it’s grungy and organic. It’s shot on location in the real favelas, with a cast mostly of real slum kids. So it looks like nothing you’ve seen before. (Except CITY OF GOD, since you all saw it a long time ago. Sorry, I’m catching up. Or SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, since they used pretty much the exact same approach, just in a different country.) (read the rest of this shit…)
It is a time of economic turmoil. The gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps getting wider and wider, like a hippopotamus’s mouth when he yawns. Hard-working people hit some bad luck and they lose their homes, property and life savings to the banks. Anger rises, and in the face of cruel systems too complex for guys like me to understand, it’s easy to fall into simplistic stick-it-to-the-man sentiment. These faceless institutions seem to be crushing people under their boots, and we want revenge. If a company can have the rights of a human being, it ought to feel the pain of a human being. We want it to suffer.
Right now Nimrod Antal is a director-of-interest because they got him doing that PREDATORS movie. And I hadn’t seen his movies (like KONTROLL and VACANCY) but ARMORED is out on DVD this week so I decided to check it out. (And yes, every movie he’s directed so far has a one word title.)
Man, you guys have been trying to get me to watch this one forever. Now I’ve seen it, so I’m not sure what’s next on the list. Paddy Considine plays Richard, a soldier back in the small English town where he grew up, planning some kind of a revenge. We know this because of the first line of the movie: “God will forgive them. He’ll forgive them and let them into Heaven. And I can’t live with that.” So he’s basically the Christ equalizer, the guy who goes around pre-emptively un-forgiving people before Jesus shows up to forgive them. It could be called THE UNFORGIVER. 
I don’t know what my problem was, but I didn’t dig on GLADIATOR like everybody else did, and for some reason I was bitter about it and skipped most of the Ridley Scott movies after that. But like the typical SCARFACE-loving American male I couldn’t resist AMERICAN GANGSTER, and that’s when I realized the error of my ways. So predictably my post BAD LIEUTENANT fascination with Nic Cage sent me back to catch up on Mr. Scott’s con men movie.
I never heard of Lee Daniels before he got a best director nomination for PRECIOUS, BASED ON etc. Turns out PRECIOUS… is his third movie as a director, SHADOWBOXER is his first, and Kent M. Beeson insisted in the comments that I had to see it.
This is the kind of story that’s best to go in dark and just watch how things unfold. But I’m gonna have to describe some of it to explain the movie. At the start Jimmy (David Caruso) is on parole, he’s got a young daughter, and he and his wife (Helen Hunt) are both recovering alcoholics. She got a babysitter so they could go to a meeting together but he didn’t know that was the plan so he already went to a meeting by himself earlier. While he stays home watching the baby his cousin Ronnie (Michael Rappaport) shows up and begs him to come drive a truck loaded with stolen cars. Jimmy tries to throw Ronnie out (“I could go to jail just for talking to you”) but Ronnie has a broken finger and convinces his cousin that somebody’s gonna kill him if he doesn’t find a driver. And Jimmy’s the last on the list. 
(sorry guys – playing catchup on reviewing the last three episodes before tonight’s new one)
I honestly never knew about this Nic Cage-featuring neo-noir until some of you recommended it to me in the comments. So thanks for that. Since I’d never heard of it and the cover looks like the type of photoshop they do on an uncopyrighted double feature DVD you’d buy for 99 cents at Safeway I assumed this was an early Cage performance. I was shocked when I realized it was 1993, same year he did the much more polished 
