City of God

The movie City of God was based on a novel of the same name written by Paulo Lins. The movie was so intense and shocking. The shanty town the movie took place in was so crazy violent and choatic and it showed and focused on such young kids behaving and getting in the situations they did was unreal. The kids from the movie were not previously actors they were actually trained for the movie.
Lil Z’s character showed the religious symbolism and karma coming into play in the film. While the article by Hart called it his baptisim into a new religion of hate. I have to disagree. From the very begining he was killing people when he got the chance, making him appear as he was always full of hate. No same person would have went into that hotel and shot everyone up the way he did when he was just a child.  But after his baptism with the shaman he did take his killings to a whole new level and much more intense to take over the ghetto and become the main drug lord. But karma came back to get him after raping Neds girlfriend while probably wearing the amulet which the shaman gave him for protection but told him not to wear while engaging in intercourse.
But a little less surprising than the age of the gangsters and the karma of Lil Z is the involvement the police had with the whole situation. The police were the ones selling the guns to Lil Z. And it was not until Lil Z refused to pay for his guns that the cops intervened in the mess of the ghettos.
The over-voice and flashbacks are a great way to foreshadow future events and keep the viewers attention and get them more mentally involved outside of all the chaos and violence to the actual story.
But all in all the movie was effective in showing the horrors of ghettos of the City of God. All the techniques Meirelles used in the film went together and worked really well for the movie. Meirelles truly got his point across and successfully showed the horrors of the ghettos of the City of God.