A subplot involves our protagonist Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) and his attempts to get laid and become a photographer. Gifts of free joints to Angélica (Alice Braga) only get him so far, until she falls for Benny instead. Because it is a movie, Rocket becomes a photographer for the Rio de Janeiro daily newspaper, finally gets to have sex, and becomes apparently the sole survivor from the City of God over the age of 15 following a big gang war between Li'l Ze and Carrot.
Also in the movie is Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), who claims he is not a gangster, but soon becomes one anyway. Rocket wants to be a street thug but fails since he deems all of his would-be victims too cool to rob.
How others will see it. City of God conquered the 2003 Cinema Brazil film festival, winning six trophies out of 16 nominations. At the Golden Globes, it was nominated as Best Foreign Language Film. It also received four prestigious Oscar nominations, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Editing, a considerable achievement for a foreign language movie with an obscure cast and a little-known director.
City of God was hardly a blockbuster, but it must have been a great success in its video release, given that the movie only cost 3.3M to make. Today at imdb.com, it has a humongous user vote total of 415K, and a remarkable user rating of 8.7 out of 10. It is #21 in the website's much-promoted Top 250.
However, the user ratings among women over 45 are significantly lower at 6.9 out of 10. This demographic is my favorite since it is less influenced by how peers view the film.
How I felt about it. I understand why City of God is popular. There is a lot of activity, mostly in form of people getting shot. The body count is ridiculous. The unremitting violence is emphasized with slow motion and close-ups.
The problem, though, is that this violence is depicted as cool, even as comedy. For example, the wife of a snitch wants to spice up their love life with a banana. The husband responds by murdering his wife. Clearly, this is presented as comedy. But when a street hood is shot shortly later, this is intended as tragedy. Personally, my sympathies are with the wife instead of the hood, but in either case, violence is provided as a means of keeping the film active and interesting.
We wonder how likely it is that camera-bug Rocket keeps hanging around hoods without ever becoming one. Or why Benny and Li'l Ze are best friends and partners even though the former is a hippie and the latter is a monster. Or why Li'l Ze can't get a girlfriend even though he is the richest and most powerful man in the ghetto. Or why Li'l Ze starts a crime spree to get Knockout Ned, after his complaints that crimes in the slum attract police, which interfere with his lucrative drug trade.
Also, Rocket's desire to get laid seems less important than the fact that the murder rate in the slums is comparable with Omaha Beach on D-Day.
The bottom line is that the violence is gratuitous and misused. How often are we expected to laugh, or gasp, or both, when a hood is suddenly plugged? Such reactions should ideally occur to lines in the script.