On Thursday last week I finally saw City of God at The Roppongi Hills Virgin Cinema. Roppongi Hills is a new building complex for the well heeled by a local real estate mogul named Mori. That being said, the Virgin Theater is state of the art, with stadium seating and advance ticket purchase available online, therefore useful to all inhabitants of Tokyo no just the super rich. I have been going to Heartland, a bar owned by Kirin, that has a cool, sleek interior, 500 yen ($6) beers (a bargain in Roppongi where it's usually 800 yen, $10, for a beer), and uses top drawer liquor in their cocktails, furthermore, it?s a bit removed from the seedy main strip.
As for City of God, it is a rare treat to have the opportunity to see a foreign film with English subtitles (the English appears at the bottom, while the Japanese subtitles run vertically to the right of the screen). I have read a lot of great reviews about this movie and it didn't disappoint. I like the way that the director moved back and forth across time to tell the story of the Rio de Janeiro slum and it's inhabitants in a non-linear fashion. The opening sequence sets the tone for the film in which life is fraught with danger coming from several different directions. In some ways this film reminds me of the equally powerful opening story in the Mexican film Amores Perros, relating to life in a ghetto quarter of Mexico City. It is as much a social chronicle of Rio as a personal story of survival and triumph based on a book that recounts real life events. Probably the best movie I've seen this year.
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