A movie to be watched: Manda Bala

Jason Kohn’s Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) won the Grand Jury Documentary Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival .
Unfortunately it’s not yet available on DVD. I should start making a list with ‘Movie to be watched’ and be diligent in finding them.

The movie depicts a hyper-realistic Brazil, which is more than samba, carnivals or World Cup soccer wins.

It’s about political corruption, money laundering via a frog-farm and ear-reconstruction- plastic-surgery for victims of a kidnapping culture where sending severed ears with ransom notes is common practice.

It’s a world where if you are rich enough to avoid traveling at street level in Sao Paolo, you take a personal helicopter from the top of a high-security apartment to the top of a high-security office. If you are not so fortunate, you travel the roads on bullet-proof vehicles with private security entourages.

And if you are anything else but fortunate, I guess you live day-by-day.

Redford and Coppola : back to the big screen

Robert Redford is to direct a film adaptation of Richard Clarke’s memoir Against all Enemies, the best-selling book about the George W. Bush administration’s handling of the al-Qaida threat before and after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The latest Robert Redford’s politically themed movie, Lions for Lambs is going to be presented at Rome’s Festival.
The film tells the story of two soldiers wounded behind enemy lines in Afghanistan.
The two soldiers, students of idealistic professor Dr. Stephen Malley (Robert Redford) become the string that binds together two disparate stories on opposite sides of America.
One is Dr. Malley’s attempt to reach the disaffected student Todd and the other one is a bombshell story about to be given by Senator Irving (Tom Cruise) to a TV journalist (Meryl Streep).

Among other titles screening in Rome is Noise, casting Tim Robbins as a vigilante exasperated by car alarms going off in the middle of the night.

Francis Ford Coppola returns to the big screen with Youth Without Youth a movie based on a novella by Mircea Eliade , about a Romanian professor who becomes young again after being hit by lightning. Coppola has picked Rome for his world premiere.