The Cannes-dazzling Italian mob movie Gomorrah begins with a
blank screen, upon which appear the film’s credits, underscored by a
piercing industrial hiss. Emanating from a film that identifies itself
as a gritty mob movie, this violent, mysterious hiss fuels dreadful
mental images: Is someone’s face being removed with an electric sander?
Is a corpse being fed into a shredder? As the hiss continued, I found
myself taking a mental tour through every scene of crime-related
cinematic sadism I’d ever witnessed, from the car-trunk stabbing of
Good-
Fellas‘ Billy Batts to the cramming of Steve Buscemi
into Fargo‘s wood chipper. At last, the source of the hiss is
revealed: the UV lamps of a tanning bed, beating down upon a male
member of the Naples crime syndicate known as the Camorra, in a
Neapolitan tanning salon that soon enough becomes a scene of carnage.
It’s a dazzling bait and switch and switch again, and one that
perfectly encapsulates Gomorrah, a mafia movie in which every
hint of glamour is killed.
Directed by Matteo Garrone and based on the book by Roberto
Saviano—whose pull-no-punches reporting on the inner workings of
the Camorra earned the writer police protection for
life—Gomorrah does for mob movies something similar to
what Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller did for westerns,
replacing monolithic, primarily cinema-fueled romance with gritty,
minute-by-minute real-life detail. In Gomorrah, this involves a
handful of entwined plotlines, from the pre-
adolescent boy who
stumbles into a job as a hit man’s helper to the haute-couture tailor
driven by his art to double-cross the mob to the most nefarious
instance of mafia-related “waste management” in history. The most
poignant plotline involves a pair of male teens, dumb and hungry and
drunk on the drama of the mob—one scene finds them reenacting
bits from Scarface in a blasted-out building. Soon enough the
grim realities of life in a country crippled by crime devour the boys,
and Gomorrah‘s relentless accumulation of small, quiet,
horrifying details ultimately proves heartbreaking.
With its devotion to the mundane, Gomorrah flirts at times
with boredom—as The Wire did its best to show, there’s a
lot of dull waiting around between bursts of criminal excitement. But
even these flirtations with boredom land as further evidence of the
filmmaker’s intelligence, both aesthetically and morally. After decades
of cinematic depictions that couldn’t help but glamorize the mob,
Gomorrah offers a grim portrait of a world no sane person would
ever inhabit willingly. It’s a great gesture and a great movie. 
the guy on the right is HAWT. i like skinny european boys. but schmadie, please explain why they are in their underpants shooting guns.
nice review
cuz they’re GETTING ILL. Scarface styyyyyle!
Someone once said, life was like a train ride into outer space…
don’t forget the ejection seat.
I like the big boy on the right!!!! Saw the movie last night. It was very good, very European with the documentary-like footage and cinematography and the “real” dialogue instead of that dialogue where everyone always has something witty to say. And it had a great soundtrack……It is interesting to see a film about organized crime, especially since Berlusconi was re-elected.
looks like a homo-a-go-go boring snoozer.
I mean on the left
David Schmader just lost all my respect.
I was excited to see this film, and caught it at a little theatre off Venice Blvd in Los Angeles. I stood in a line with people and we watched a homeless man throw up Jack ‘n the Box across the street.
Once inside, the theatre resembled a porno house from Taxi Driver but I settled in. Dick aflop, I opened my peanut M&M’s.
The beginning with the Blade-Runner-Blue-tanning salon was fine, but then it fell apart. There are long, long, long, long DULL parts to this movie. Often you don’t know who’s killing who and why. It’s terribly constructed and squeezes way too hard to cum. It’s like the filmmakers said, “Ey Luigi! Let’s ‘old da kamra on dem fo’ 5 minutes! It’ll mean someting”
It doesn’t. The movie could stand to lose 40 minutes and if you think this is “a great movie”, God help you.
Seriously folks. I love great movies, but this ain’t one of them. If you don’t believe me, these are some recent films I bought and love. Judge for yourself:
Days of Heaven
Half Nelson
Tigerland
The Edge
I agree that it drug on a bit long indeed but I pretty much understood what was going on, though it was a bit hard to follow. I guess I just like that sort of film-making A lot of French films are like that. I saw Cache several months ago with Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteiul (spelling? what a surprise to see him in a French film!). I wanted to shove bamboo under my fingernails.
Some really good foreign films to see are:
Låt den rätte komma in (Sweden)
The Short animated film and Oscar Winner, La maison en petite cubes by Kunio Katô (Japan but in French) beautiful film!!!!!!
I second Half Nelson!!!!!
I think the bottom line (also applying to Haneke’s films – Cache, etc) is: if you’re patient it will be worth it.
You dudes obviously were in the mood for something a little more simple. No problem with that. I saw Outlander and it was awesome! Totally seriously, little dudes!