DVD OF THE WEEK

BUS 174 *****
Dir: Jose Padilha

This is an extraordinary documentary, which originally showed at film festivals five years ago. Perhaps its DVD release now is tied to the release of the recent Elite Squad, another film set in the crime and poverty of Rio de Janeiro.
At the centre of the film is a hostage drama that enthralled the whole of Brazil in 2000. A man in Rio hijacked a bus and – with the full spotlight of the live TV media on him terrorised the hostages on board for four and a half hours. He threatened to kill the hostages and himself. The long negotiations included even the governor of the state.
So far, so good, but this is only the starting point for this remarkable examination of cause and effect in a society where the rule of law has to all intents and purposes broken down..
During the negotiation, TV reporters found out that the young hijacker was in fact a survivor of one of Rio's most horrendous crimes: as a young street kid he had escaped being murdered by policemen in an infamous case of child mass murder in the early 90s and, instead of being protected by the government, was sent to a reform unit under appalling conditions. He had also, as a young child, witnessed his mother being stabbed to death by bandits.
This is not a documentary with easy answers. It raises many more questions than it answers, both about the spirals of violence in an overcrowded impoverished nation and about the ethics of TV reporting and journalism. If you want to create a mini Rio film festival try this, Elite Squad, and City of God. Your comfortable life in New Zealand will seem like a blessing. We don't know how lucky we are.

Traitor(****), like pretty much every film involving the 'war on terror” sank without a trace at the box office. Which is a shame, because it is a smart involving thriller with a perspective not often seen on screen. Don Cheadle is a bomb maker, an ex-US soldier now at the centre of a plot to plant multiple bombs in America.
Guy Pearce is the FBI agent on his trail. But all – surprise! – is not what it seems. Terrific acting and a plot that allows exploration of anti-American motives raise this one well above the ordinary.

There is an interesting premise somewhere at the heart of The Gathering (**). It is that the same group of creepy people can be seen through history observing tragic events, some sort of immortal watchers or witnesses. Set in the sleepy English countryside with Christina Ricci presumably brought in to boost imagined US box office, there is a reason this has remained unreleased for seven years. It starts dull and goes from there to silly and dull and finally annoying and dull. All traces of a horror film are muted at best.

Paranoia is front and centre in The Listening (***), a spy story centring around the NSA's Echelon operation, which involves the worldwide bugging of phones. It posits a new extension to the surveillance which allows phones to be used as microphones while they are not in use.
This is (hopefully) fictional. Unfortunately some pesky Italians steal an important briefcase and soon an innocent women is targeted by the evil corporation behind the new equipment. NSA agent Michael Parks attempts to save her and expose the corporate shenanigans. A much more thoughtful film than you'd expect.

Zombie Diaries (*) is cheap and silly. One assumes it is attempting to cash in on George Romero's Diary of the Dead. Like that (superior) film this is – yawn – all shot with a handheld first-person camera. Unusually it takes place in a zombie-ravaged England and has one or two original ideas, but everything is somewhat sunk by special effects so cheap that I would swear the partly-eaten dead bodies are actually people with their eyes closed and gore effects painted on their T-shirts.