Film Comparative: City of God and Sexy Beast

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The films City of God and Sexy Beast are both crime films that share many similarities such as narrative shape, light, and in both films the narrative unravels in foreign countries. The on difference they have is the classification of crime genre. City of God 2002, directed by Fernando Meirelles depicts the Rocket’s past, how he became a photographer, and how he got out of the slums in a chilling sequence of flashbacks to the people he knew and the life he ends up leading, the whole film could play out as a drama. Sexy Beast 2001, directed by Jonathan Glazer showcases the life of Gal a retired British gangster living in Spain who is forced to commit a bank robbery when his wife, Dee Dee Dove; Don, a gangster recruiting him for his team of bank robbers, in order to come finally bury the past. Gal’s adventures are sometimes hilarious and resemble cartoons. City of God and Sexy Beast both depict the harsh reality of loyalty and the burden of guilt and the damage of the past through the devices employed in order to narrate the films. A narrative film is a film that depicts a story through movement of pictures, sound, and words, it is audiovisual, and has two shapes. A narrative film can have a shape because it can interact with space and time; films mold space allowing the viewer to create perceptions about depth and can condense and speed up time. The two shapes that a film can are linear and circular. A linear narrative is a film in which the start, middle, and end transition smoothly and are unobstructed; the start runs into the middle and the middle leads to the end just like a fairytale has beginning, middle, and end. In contrast circular narratives are varied and can start anywhere in the film depicting flashbacks and transitio... ... middle of paper ... ...quite different from each other: City of God draws from the tragedy making it a drama while Sexy Beast acts like farce depicting the absurd and illogical creating humor that the spectator can understand. These elements reveal that both Rocket and Gal are man full of secretes, guilt, and burden. Two different films that share nothing but the crime genre of film depict men with similarities that are conveyed through different devices. Works Cited City of God. Dir. Fernando Meirelles. Perf. Alexandre Rodriguez, Alice Braga, Leandro Firmino and Phellipe Haagensen. Miramax. 2002. Film. Dick, Bernard F. Anatomy of Film. Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Sixth edition. Print. Sexy Beast. Dir. Jonathan Glazer. Perf. Alvaro Monje, Amanda Redman, Carvan Kendall, Ian McShane, James Fox, Juliane White, Sir Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone. Fox Searchlight. 2001. Film

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