Gomorrah (2008)

I read the book, I'm Italian, I'm a fan of mob movies but this movie was simply terrible. Out of the many stories the movie tries to tell only one (the tailor) is remotely interesting narratively. In fact that story should have been taken out of this pathetic dribble and made into its own movie. Honestly I think in this case the emperor has no clothes. This film, after about half an hour into it is borrrrring, completely uninteresting and incoherent. It has zero redeeming qualities. The director and writer needed to turn this over to someone who has an idea of what narrative storytelling is. Never have I seen so many people consistently leaving the movie theater. I felt like leaving, but hoping that it would somehow get better, I stayed. I wish I had left when I first suspected this film was going to suck (five minutes into it). Don't waste your money or your time.

Fmovies: I'm writing mostly as a reaction to this film's relatively low IMDb rating...i think along with The Tree of Life with its almost shockingly low 6.7 rating, Gomorrah is, literally, the most underrated recent film on here. This documentary style crime mosaic is essential viewing, plain and simple. If you want to get a true sense of what modern organized crime is about, how it operates, how it permeates a particular place and how it effects individuals, look no further. Gomorrah is unflinching, uncompromising, devoid of glamour or conceit, it puts you right into its unforgiving and hopeless milieu.

There is no excess narrative fat here, no style for style's sake...it's probably the truest description of an organized crime network i've seen

This is one great movie by director Matteo Garrone. It's a living example of contemporary neorealist cinema. Based on Roberto Saviano's homonymous bestseller, the movie explores the world of one of the most atrocious criminal organizations in the world, the Camorra. Using unsophisticated realist cinematography, editing and aesthetics, and through the choice of actors, most of whom are simply local residents of the neighborhood, the movie does throw you mercilessly in this inferno for over two hours, where you can smell the blood, feel the misery of Naples's slums and live that vicious circle of violence, despair and injustice. A masterpiece and must-see!

Gomorrah fmovies. yes agree with all of the above comments. Not much to add except the film clearly references several earlier Italian masterpieces. Rocco and His Brothers for one, Paisa for another. I love the way this film strips away the glamour which characterizes Hollywood gangster films to reveal the degraded, degenerate and putrid reality of the criminal world. The people most affected by crime are those at the bottom living on sink estates like the one depicted, with an ineffectual police content to contain the situation in the ghettos. There's a really telling scene where a young graduate, drawn in to a criminal conspiracy of illegal disposal of toxic waste, decides hes had enough. His boss tells him to dump a box of peaches grown on toxic land, 'can t you smell them' ... the way the fruit contrasts with the shiny, flashy big SUV this guy drives. Our knowledge as the audience of what hes been up to, signing off a container of toxic waste to the African captain of a container ship as 'humanitarian aid...' This sort of symbolism elevates the film to the level of the great Italian masterpieces of cinema. Peaches, fruit, food is such a staple of Italian culture. Perfect looking peaches which are grown on toxic land become a metaphor for Italy itself. The measured pace certainly wont be for everyone, five people walked out the multiplex where I watched it. This is the thinking persons gangster movie. You need to work at it. The violence is shocking for its matter of factness whats most disturbing is how human life and dignity have become utterly ... I dunno I m searching for words here. Trivial? Trivial isn't the right word. Its more complete and utter degradation. Human life here has lost all dignity. When someones killed its in almost documentary fashion. Conventions of the gangster genre are discarded instead its shocking in its suddenness and sheer banality. Two obese, sweaty men in bermuda shorts despatch a pair of coked up boys whove been making a nuisance of themselves. Human life here has no value and for me this masterpiece of cinema articulates my belief we are at the beginning of the end of Western civilisation. Appropriate coming from the country which gave us Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Silvio Berlusconi...

Some publications gave Gomorra a perfect rating, while others gave more basic reviews but, in a week where The Times reviewed about 10 new releases and gave this 5 stars and everything else 1 or 2, I decided this was a film I should check out and that The House Bunny could perhaps wait for another time (specifically, when it is the last film on Earth). Gomorra opens with a beauty salon hit which I imagine is meant to introduce us to the violent and treacherous world of the Cammora crime syndicate in the locality of Naples, Italy. As an impacting opening, it does work but the "introduction" idea is sadly where the film is roundly weak and it does mean that it has the potential to confuse.

Before I get a barrage of messages pointing out to me that cousins shouldn't marry, I do not mean that I could not follow the specific threads of the film but just that the film offers nothing to inform the new viewer of the world that we are about to enter. I'm not sure the best of doing this but certainly at first I didn't totally appreciate the scale of the organisation, the structure or the setting and it took me a minute as a result to get into the stories. Unlike similar films, the separate threads never really come together in any way other than they share a grounding in location and the problem of the Cammora. Outside of a specific introduction for those coming in cold, the film does give a sort of introduction to the problem as we first follow one of the characters around the nightmarish, enclosed estate of flats which seems to perform the task of judge and prison-officer as those born into it have little opportunity to escape it and essentially have their fate sealed by virtue of their environment.

Within this feat of architecture we follow several threads including a money-man, a boy getting into the life on the lowest rung, a man starting out in the corrupt world of waste management, a black-market tailor looking to earn a bit more on the side and two young men who decide to seize power in their region from the old, fat men who sit at the top. In terms of engagement, there isn't really a huge emotional draw within the film but instead it all feels very realistic and dead - so it is not so much that you feel for the specific characters so much as you have a constant sense of hopelessness and of how small and petty it all it. This is not the Italian gangsterisms of The Godfather where there is a certain sense of class and aspiration, in Gomorra the top men are trapped in the world the same as everyone else - with more money perhaps but they are not living in mansions or controlling things from a tropical island. The delivery of the film helps this as it is well shot on location and has a hand-held feel of grit and dirt. I didn't really like the technique employed throughout where the focus was on the subject in the close foreground and everything else was blurred, even as it came into play in the scene but otherwise it was well done, with the sudden moments of violence made more impacting by not being seen due to confusion simulated in the camera or by quick editing.

Gomorra has been compared to City of God, Goodfellas and all the other crime films that get wheeled out for reviews. In most ways this is not really a fair description because Gomorra does not have the style and flair of those films, nor do all the narrative threads come together neatly in the way we have come to expect. However it is still an engagingly bleak and realistic look into the world of the Cammora that is well

Based on Roberto Saviano's best seller ( over 1.000.000 copies sold in Italy ), this movie is an inside look at Camorra's underworld in Naples, depicted as a sort of modern Dante's Inferno. Children and young guys are involved in a merciless, cruel struggle for life and blood money which has caused over 3.600 dead so far which is a bigger slaughter than the others committed by different criminal organizations in Italy and elsewhere. Five stories from Saviano's book have been chosen and told through a few professional actors and a lot of real people that never stood in front of a camera before. A heavy, gray sky hangs over these sleazy landscapes as if the beauty of one of the Italian lands of the sun had fled and the moral darkness had taken its place. Go watch this unconventional masterpiece as soon as it's released somewhere in your area.