City Of Men (2005/Miramax DVD)
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras: C+ Film: B-
To my
absolute surprise 2002’s City of God
not only was a big critical hit, but apparently has become fairly popular among
the masses as well. I thought it was a
decent film and similarly to 2006’s Crash
(reviewed elsewhere on this site), was glad that I saw the film, but
wouldn’t necessarily need to see it again anytime soon. If you do a search on Internet Movie Data
Base, you will see that City of God
is actually #17 in the top 250 films rated and received over 100,000
votes. This surprises me to a great deal
for a foreign film of this nature with lots of brutal violence, drugs, sex, but
it’s still up there despite that.
Now here
we are years later and the producers are hoping to hit another home run with
the follow-up feature City of Men,
which I can tell you straight-up will disappoint if you expect the same
treatment as the first film. This film
came after the hit series under the same title was produced and one of the
series directors (Paolo Morelli) took on the main feature The TV show was a
much bigger hit though and ran from 2002-2005.
Perhaps the biggest downfall of the feature is that it’s not only living
or attempting to live up to the first film, but also a series that followed and
both were exceptionally well-done if nothing else. This time around though the film feels forced
and doesn’t have the rawness that the first film and TV series had. For many it will feel like a been there done
that type of thing, which can only carry you so far, for me this marks the end
of the line and hopefully the producers will get the hint as well.
This is
not to say that City of Men is a
poor film or a poor production, in fact quite the opposite, but at the same
time the material feels spread too thin.
Here we are introduced to the violent and crazed streets of Rio de
Janeiro where we see the struggles between friendships, families, and society
as a whole.
The 1.85
X 1 anamorphically enhanced image is rough looking in many respects containing
the gritty and raw look similar to both the show and the City of God, so the overall ‘look’ is purposefully lackluster at
times, although those things are only escalated by the fact that standard
definition DVD can only do so much and the video black suffers the most. Color overall looks pretty good with all
things considered although there is a bit of smearing that tends to happen,
which almost fits the character of the film. It would be interesting to see how
this would look on Blu-ray to see if some of those issues can be resolved.
The Dolby
Digital 5.1 mix is nothing overly intense and won’t necessarily challenge your
system in sonic ways, but delivers the presentation well enough to get the
idea. Most people will be reading
subtitles anyway, unless you are fluent in Portuguese. There is only one extra included, which is a
segment called Building A City of Men,
which is a nice addition, but most would have liked to have had a commentary
track to accompany the film, but my best guess is that the people involved are
perhaps losing their energy just the same with these projects.
- Nate Goss
