‘Chicago 10’
*** 1/2
The winter doldrums are officially over: The first great film of 2008 has arrived. “Chicago 10,” Brett Morgen’s audacious, ambitious and improbably affecting movie, chronicles the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the notorious trial that followed. It brings to life one of the sorriest chapters in American cultural and political history and breathes new life into a film genre that usually has all the imagination and verve of a visit to Madame Tussauds.
A spirited and often inspired mash-up of motion-capture animation, archival footage and a terrifically anachronistic soundtrack, “Chicago 10” stars the voice talent of Hank Azaria, Mark Ruffalo and Jeffrey Wright as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale, who with five other activists were arrested on conspiracy charges during the days of outrage and violence that broke out between anti-war demonstrators and Chicago police (by way of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s poisonous machine) outside the convention. The trial became a joke, with the erratic Judge Julius Hoffman (the late Roy Scheider) presiding; Morgen calls his movie “Chicago 10” because much of the drama of the story came from the defendants’ attorneys, the legendary William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) and Leonard Weinglass (who voices himself).
Cutting between the animated footage of the trial (written from transcripts) and searing images of the demonstrations and their tragic outcome, Morgen plunges viewers into the anarchic, exhilarating and finally ambiguous world of 1968 America; his final stroke of genius is his choice of music, which includes a breathtaking use of Eminem’s “Mosh.”
Rated R for language and brief sexual images. 1 hour, 40 minutes.
– Ann Hornaday,
Washington Post
‘City of Men’
** 1/2
“City of Men” is sort of a sequel to “City of God,” but it substitutes soap for the frenetic style that made Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 hyper-violent gangster movie a career-launching art-house sensation.
For all the critical attention Meirelles’ movie received, its follow-up arrives relatively unheralded, almost as an afterthought.
Meirelles remains on board as a producer. Lead actors Douglas Silva and Darlan Cunha were both in “City of Men,” but here they’re playing different characters, albeit in the same squalid Rio de Janeiro setting.
Director Paulo Morelli, who shares a story credit with screenwriter Elena Soarez, hammers home how a cycle of absent fathers has produced multiple generations of lost boys. And by hammer home, the presentation comes almost straight from an ABC Afterschool Special, with characters speaking with the kind of blunt self-awareness that would go largely unsaid in the real world.
“City of Men” wears its message on its sleeve, but that doesn’t prevent it from indulging in frequent bursts of violence. Morelli lacks Meirelles’ flair for shooting action, though he has the same sharp eye for juxtaposing the city’s potent beauty with the dirty lives of its poorest inhabitants.
Silva and Cunha play lifelong friends who have grown up on Dead End Hill, purposely avoiding the gang warfare that punctuates their lives. Naturally, it turns out that the fathers of these young men were once connected, and that the sins of the fathers threaten the tight bond between the sons.
Rated R for violence, language, sexual content. 1 hour, 50 minutes
– Glenn Whipp,
Los Angeles News Group
