Send a Bullet (Manda Bala) - Movie Review and Showtimes - New York Magazine

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Send a Bullet (Manda Bala)

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(No longer in theaters)
  • Rating: No Rating
  • Director: Jason Kohn   Cast: Jader Barbalho, Claudio Fonteles, Helbio Dias, Juarez Avelar, Paulo Lamarao
  • Running Time: 85 minutes
  • Reader Rating: Write a Review

Genre

Documentary

Producer

Joey Frank, Jared Goldman, Jason Kohn

Distributor

Slowhand Cinema Releasing

Release Date

Aug 17, 2007

Release Notes

NY

Official Website

Review

Jason Kohn’s gripping Manda Bala (�Send a Bullet�) is the opposite of a high-school science doc. It’s a free-form portrait of a place�Brazil�with scary running motifs: kidnapping, mutilation, plastic surgery, bulletproofing, and frog farming. On a breathtaking widescreen, Kohn surveys a city, São Paulo, in which abduction and ransom are big business, in which plastic surgeons get rich replacing earlobes sliced off and mailed to families, in which corruption reaches from the country’s most powerful senator to its least powerful slum-dweller�a kidnapper who muses that maybe one of the ten kids he mutilates people to support will grow up to be president and change things for the better. The sums skimmed from northern Brazilian frog farms are nothing compared to, say, what Halliburton makes off the average bungled Iraqi plant or hospital, but it’s enough to play havoc with the Brazilian Amazon, which is enough to accelerate global warming. And there goes Dorothy over the Verrazano! — David Edelstein

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