Tropa de Elite por Gringos
I’m friggin'loving the critics reactions to our brazilian reality, I mean… movie, Elite Squad.
REUTERS:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews
“For some reason, their work involves getting second jobs so that Neto works at the police auto shop while Matias goes to law school.”
It’s from Reuters, believe it. This guy on reuters doesn’t have a clue of what he saw. It has more:
“though the story is told in a confusing mix of time-shifting flashbacks, and at the end there's still no sign of the pope.”
HE WANTED TO SEE THE POPE! Fuck me. It continues...
"Neto and Matias have to make it through an odd sort of training camp that involves ritual humiliation. Then, they're handed high-powered rifles and sent into the slums to kill everybody."
Never saw a critic so clueless. But not every surprised critic is so dumb:
http://www.screendaily.com/ScreenDailyArticle
"the film could be read as a nihilistic, even reactionary statement - to wit, that in a corrupt world, brute integrity is the only response. But you rarely feel that Padilha and his collaborators are making this stuff up"
Variety calls the movie facist so many times, and even compares it to Rambo, and also says:
http://www.variety.com/review/
"a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs (...) Though pic was Brazil’s top grosser of 2007, arthouse auds won’t coddle to the inescapable right-wing p.o.v (...) Charges of fascism by pic’s critics aren’t merely knee-jerk liberal reactions, but an unimpeachable statement of fact."
This one also didn't get what it was about. After those reviews, Elite Squad won the Golden Bear, and they changed the approach to something more respectable:
"Jose Padilha’s controversial Brazilian crime actioner "The Elite Squad,” an examination of police corruption and gang violence, took the Golden Bear at the 58th Berlinl Intl. Film Festival on Saturday."
more serious, huh? But yet, they didn't accepted the golden bear:
"The Golden Bear win took local critics by surprise due to its mixed reviews, many of which accused the film of fascism and glorifying police brutality, but Padilha said the pic reflected the reality on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Some, however, welcomed the decision to award the only action film in what many critics described as an uninspired lineup."
another one, from indiewire attending the festival after the prize:
http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2008/02/berlin
"the overwhelming ugliness of that film has stayed with me, not just for its rank misogyny, dismaying though that was (women, we learned, are either weak and liberal, or sluttish, greedy and stupid), but also for its genuinely fascist sensibility -- never more evident than when one of the cops accuses a student of being scum, "like the whores, the pimps, the abortionists ... Er, excuse me?"
The critics were blind, but the berlinale jury got it: "the international jury of the film festival praised the film's depiction of the involvement of the drug barons and the elite squad in a deadly game of mutual dependence, corruption and brutality."
Padilha, the movie director, resumed it all “Many journalists didn't seem to have understood the film. I'm very concerned about that..."
Here's a review from someone who got the movie, and says exactly what we brazillians need to hear, it could be coming from some gringo's mouth, but no... ironically, it's from a PUC's professor, the university that Elite Squad portraits:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/tropa_de_elite
"The black gear and chilling symbol (a sword inside a skull) are not just for show: the regiment is used to getting what it wants, if necessary via torture and killing. Don't forget, this is war. (...) The effect has been felt in Brazil's television news programmes, which now show Bope's latest operation or a helicopter-led assault by black-clad caveiras (skulls) who shoot drug-dealers (real or suspected? No one is asking) as they run for their life through the favelas. Tropa de elite has thus returned the debt it borrowed from reality, and with interest.(...) Brazil needs to learn how to live peacefully as a political community. The responsibility of creating it is one that all Brazilians must accept, including Capitão Nascimento, including artists."
Even so, that's the beauty of cinema, only looking from outside to understand what we are.
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Labels: critics, elite squad, journalists, tropa de elite
