300

What can I say that’s not already said about this movie? It’s a moving comic book, just like the other movie based on Frank Miller’s graphic novels, Sin City. It is a visual treat beyond compare, each frame art-worked with extreme love and a panache for violence. There’s no story, no sir. So please don’t use the tight-upper-lipped “it didn’t do justice to the artistic expression of the medium of cinema, while attempting to explore an unnecessary gamut of bloodshed… yada yada…” Leave the criticism tightwrapped at the farther end of your colon.

This movie doesn’t need critics or fans. It needs begets worshippers. It sets out to be an entertaining two hour visual and aural spectacle, and that’s exactly what it is. The right rock mix at the right action-packed moment, the right camera angle that gets you into the skin of the soldier who is taking a spear pounding from a Spartan, the anger in the eyes of a king and the pride that makes a queen.

Definitely worth a watch at the cinemas. Rather, make that two visits to the screens, not one.

City of God (Cidade de Deus)

When a Brazilian movie running subtitles is rated IMDB Top 250 #17, it usually intrigues me. And when the movie finally came to Indian theatres 3 years after it was released world-wide, thanks to the ever-enthu buddy of mine, Vivek, we landed in a theatre so empty that it seemed to be a private screening for us.

We had no shit clue about what to expect from the movie, and that made all the more impressive. It is set in a slum-town near Rio, ironically named City of God. It was a place where it was a rare blessing to live beyond 20, if one lives past disease, poverty, plunderers and gang-wars. A place where kids do drugs, the police are gun-runners, and everyone shoots first, talks later. Where survival is an everyday challenge, and losing your kin is an everyday occurance.

It is in this setting that the hero Rocket discovers his love for photography. The film is about the delicate game one has to play in the City of God to just stay alive, and about a passion that pulls a boy out of a living hell and gives him some purpose in life.

This movie is no fairy-tale, nor does it promise a feel good ending. It just tells a story as plain as truth itself, in its brutal and shocking self.

Again, definitely worth a watch. And definitely worth reflecting upon.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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