nada & entertainment Sara on 23 Jan 2007 03:02 pm
Blood Diamond
I under anticipated the mental and physical toll this movie would take on the viewer. I sat the entire movie with my shoulders hunched up around my ears from stress and I have felt so sad and useless since.
The movie, though, was excellent. Excellent acting, directing, filming, etc. I am a new fan of Leonardo after seeing The Departed and he was as amazing in this film as he was in that one, accents and all. Djimon Hounsou, simply amazing. And though I have never gotten Jennifer Connelly despite all my male friend’s ravings and found her a bit unbelievable in this role, it was not so much so as to distract me.
There were two nagging details about the script - not the overall story (which of course is a bit unrealistic) but in a couple of word choices. In two scenes where Danny Archer (DiCaprio) is delivering clever barbs about reality to the idealistic Maddy Bowen (Connelly) I was struck by two things he said as being out of sync with the year the story was supposed to have taken place (late 90s). One is the term “bling bling” - was that so ingrained in colloquial English that a Rhodesian diamond smuggler who had never left Africa and had little exposure to Americans would have picked up and thrown into conversation? The other is when he was saying how people like her come with their “little bottles of hand sanitizer.” I am an admitted addict to those little bottles and I never saw them in wide use until the last couple years.
There were other details I could discuss that I liked or would like more discussion about, but hard to say what they are without totally ruining the whole movie (though it is somewhat predictable anyway).
A disappointment was at the end when the credits say that it is up to the consumer to ensure that the diamonds they buy are conflict free. That was totally lame. Up to the middle-American 16 year old who goes to Zales at the mall and blows their savings from working at the local video store on some ugly sapphire and diamond flecked ring? Come ON. Why not say “don’t buy diamonds because you never really know where they come from” which was the WHOLE POINT of the movie?! Or “all diamonds are blood diamonds?” Or SOMETHING.
Anyway, have a look at Human Rights Watch site on what you can do about child soldiers.
