If there's any justice in Hollywood, the belated recognition accorded City of God in this year's Oscar nominations will have the same positive effect on the Best Foreign Language Film category as the snub of 1994's Hoop Dreams ultimately had on the way the Academy judges documentaries.
Shown at several international film festivals and released in Brazil in 2002, Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles' beyond-gritty urban drama should have been nominated in 2003. Instead, the official Brazilian entry inexplicably was denied the privilege of a vote by the full Academy. A year later, in a loud rebuke of that decision, voters in the cinematography, writing, editing and directing branches rewarded the R-rated, Portuguese-language film by making it a finalist in four categories.
City of God follows the journey of a trio of boys from the Cidade de Deus housing project, as they rise to prominence in the neighborhood's criminal hierarchy, over a 20-year span. Each is given an opportunity to escape, but only one makes it through the final door. Sadly, by the end of the 135-minute story, the city of God is firmly in the hands of Satan.
Because of Meirelles' comic-tragic approach to violence and gore, along with frenetic camera work and loud pop music, critics rushed to compare his style to that of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and of course, Martin Scorsese. Meirelles, who was inspired by Paulo Lins' semiautobiographical novel, has said he owes more to directors Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, whose socio-realistic instincts often require actors to forgo scripts. He recruited Lund, who had made a documentary about Rio's drug dealers, to conduct acting workshops among children from the impoverished neighborhood.
Thus, the movie owes less to Tarantino than to Charles Dickens and William Golding, as well as such uncompromising movies as Pixote, The Harder They Come, Black Orpheus and Los Olividados. Indeed, it can be argued that Scorsese tried to map similar territory two years ago in Gangs of New York. Instead of Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and other costumed Hollywood stars, though, that film would have benefited from the raw passion and gangster swagger of the amateurs in City of God.
Few characters in the history of literature have enjoyed as long a shelf life as Edgar Rice Burrough's immortal Lord of the Apes, who as early as 1918, made the transition from books to film. If one forgives the inherent racism of the legend's conceit —a white man becomes "darkest" Africa's hope for salvation—the best of the series' films are very entertaining, indeed. These would include the Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan vehicles in Warners' The Tarzan Collection, including Tarzan the Ape Man, Tarzan and His Mate, Tarzan Escapes, Tarzan's Secret Treasure, Tarzan's New York Adventure and Tarzan Finds a Son! Besides providing some goofy fun, it's interesting to see how after 1934, the Hays Production Code dampened the overt sexual chemistry between Tarzan and Jane. French actor Christopher Lambert was a remarkably poor choice to play Tarzan in the modern adaptation, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, but the 1984 epic benefits from some wonderful cinematography and a thoughtful treatment by Robert Towne (before he removed his name). Also new to DVD this week is John Derek's 1981 turkey, Tarzan, the Ape Man, in which the director's wife, Bo, offers us a woman's perspective on Jane ... blessedly, post-Code.
It's the rare writer who can invent a line of dialogue that resonates like, "If you build it, he will come," from the multi-tissue male-weeper Field of Dreams. The new, two-disc, 15th-anniversary version of Phil Alden Robinson's baseball-equals-life drama arrives in the proper wide-screen aspect, and provides all the documentary evidence you need to appreciate how a diamond carved into an Iowa cornfield could cause so many men to acknowledge their innermost feelings about their fathers and long-lost baseball gloves.
Ceremonies commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day probably raised a lot of questions in the minds of young people about war and heroism, especially considering the current debacle in Iraq. To help provide some answers, Lions Gate has released WWII: Road to Victory. It includes more than seven hours of archival footage—colorized for the benefit of contemporary audiences, no doubt—shot during pivotal battles in both theaters of war. It's nothing you can't see on the History Channel every day, but the crucial moments are much easier to find on DVD.
Several new wide-screen releases from Paramount's vaults are noteworthy mostly as period pieces, as they provide little in the way of features. John Schlesinger's creepy adaptation of The Day of the Locust is an essential movie about Hollywood; Goodbye Columbus, based on Philip Roth's novel, introduced the JAP stereotype to mainstream audiences; and The President's Analyst, in which James Coburn did for POTUS what, 35 years later, Billy Crystal would do for a Mafia don. Also, from Home Vision's classics shelf comes Volker Schlondorff's lush adaptation of Proust's Swann in Love, starring suave Jeremy Irons and voluptuous Ornella Muti.