Defining movies of the 00s

A problematic film is also productive. Tropa De Elite managed to put the civil war-like situation in Rio De Janeiro on the agenda. Formerly unthinkable remedies could be put forth, like the decriminalization of ganja. That’s really the central theme of the movie: the trafficking of green leaves, not white powder – poor kids being killed in the drug wars so middle class hipsters can puff that weed. Legalization could do a lot (together with a project aiming at social equality, that is); it would take away much power from the gangster guerrillas of Brazil.

Gomorra

Roberto Saviano’s book is one of the greatest reading experiences of recent times, and one of the most important documents regarding our society; a Heart Of Darkness for present day captialism. Isn’t it about organized crime? Exactly. Gangster shit is all about a profit. It follows the same rules as all other business, although generally with a different relation to the state and its laws. Saviano constantly clarifying for us and showing us the enormous reach of these modern, horizontally organized business empires (who makes up about half of the economy in the area around Naples, Italy) is the the book’s real strenght (also: his HST-like ambition to mix the personal and the political and put his body right in the center of his subject).

The adaptation to the screen is brilliant, taking only a couple different pages from the book and weaving it to an engaging kick-in-the-stomach kind of plot. Technically it reminds me of Tropa De Elite, but closer to a documentary style (no voice-overs). Just like the book, the movie is a clarifying, demystifying piece of work. It shows us that it’s not about codes of honor and high class. It’s kids running drugs and fucked up mullets and crappy eurotechno and ugly track suits and everything for a profit, even burying toxic waste in your own land so the vegetables give your people cancer.

Fight Club

The lecagy of this movie is summed up quite nicely in an interview with Wu-Ming – it’s a movie from a time when people thought poetical terrorism could change the world. Still it’s a potent cinematic experience. (And yeah, technically it’s from a couple months into the 90s, but whatever.)

Do you, by any means, relate to Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club?

Well, I liked both the book and the movie they made out of it. I was in Houston, Texas, when the movie was released (in the Fall of 1999) and I went to see it on the very first evening. After the ending (which, by the way, anticipated the events of September 11th), I got out and heard a guy murmuring: “Fuckin’ weird…”. The night after, I went back to see it again. Not that I ideologically stick with the Mayhem Project (a “collectivist” project like those I mentioned above), but I found many similarities with the state of mind we were in during the Luther Blissett days. “Luther Blissett” was our collective Tyler Durden, sometimes one of us went someplace, someone approached him or her and whispered: “Hey, Luther, I side with you!” or “You’re great”, or something along those lines. There was always this guy walking ahead of us, we were walking in his footsteps Recently, I downloaded an avi file of the movie, very good quality, ripped from the DVD. I saw it again and I noticed that it is a very 1990′s movie, some parts are a little outdated, but it’s still powerful.

City Of God

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