Blood Diamond is a very strange, awkwardly predictable film. It's directed by Edward Zwick and it shows. Here's what you need to know. At the very end, the native black man dresses up in a suit and gets a standing ovation just for being alive.
For the longest time, I knew that there was something about the movie Glory that was wrong, but I just couldn't put my finger on it. Then I read a review about it calling it 'a white man's movie' and suddenly I understood. 'Glory' was one of those few films that completely dumbfounded audiences. In my life, I've noticed several. The first ever was 'Apocalypse Now', then 'Platoon', then 'Glory' and finally 'Schindler's List'. Each of those times I watched audiences file out of the theatre in stunned silence. By the time it happened with Schindler, I had found that review of Glory and learned not to trust it.
One of the most difficult things about being a conscientious American is distinguishing your appreciation for intellect from your altruistic instincts. It is the inability of many of us to do this which creates in us the a moral imperative when confronted with facts never before known or considered. It is a liberal political tactic to shock people into action or activism despite their prior undisturbed life. So it is not surprising at all that Al Gore decided to call his global warming film 'An Inconvenient Truth'. I have felt uniquely immune from this tactic after watching a particular episode of a television show which taught me that knowledge is pain, and therefore might be something to be avoided. Not for any moral reasons at all, but for the fact that very few people can actually be responsible to the moral consequences of great knowledge. In otherwords, knowledge generates a debt in moral people, but it is not a debt that can be satisfied by token gestures. This is something directors like Zwick hopes audiences never discover because it would bankrupt the political import of their thrillers. Unfortunately as the case may be, it doesn't stop him from trying either in the historical sense or in present tense.
Blood Diamond is present tense. That has the benefit of not being historically revisionist but it is more than offset by depicting an utterly chaotic sense of violence. Of the several notable films on African wars, this one concentrates least on any rationale for the killing. While you are brought to understand that rebels are constantly battling government troops it comes to be used as a bloody montage to underscore the egregiously shallow performances of the main characters. This is not a dramatic story, it is an issue movie stocked with characters, action and scenery.
Perky, nosy, stubborn, good looking American female journalist.
Rugged, handsome, cynical, roguish, selfish, ex-military, Rhodesian diamond smuggler.
Courageous, desperate, long-suffering, simple, honest, single-minded tribal fisherman.
A 100 carat raw diamond
A corrupt corporation.
A story that will change the world.
Except this movie isn't one third as good as Syriana.
Recent Comments