Blood Diamond
Last night we watched the movie Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, and Djimon Hounsou. It is about the diamond trade and diamond smuggling in Africa, particularly Sierra Leone around 1999. I bought the DVD based only on the theater preview, and it turned out to be worth it.
The movie overarching message is pretty chilling, and makes you think twice about the jewerly you have bought. There is pretty good dialog and lots of action. It really reminds me a lot of Hotel Rwanda, which is another great movie with a similar 'world-ignoring-Africa' theme.
Clearly the goal of this movie was to move the viewer to the point where they would not buy these 'conflict diamonds' and thereby help the situation in any small way they could. However, I think there's a problem with that motive.
*MODERATE SPOILER ALERT* If all these movies that are trying to change the world focus in on a happy ending about one person instead of the hundreds, thousands, or millions of deaths and terrible endings, people here are never going to get it. I don't know if anyone would go to a movie that had a bad ending, or if a bad ending would even constitute a movie, but when Solomon walks into the G-8 conference to speak and gets a standing ovation, that's not a typical ending. Everyone leaves the theater feeling better about that than if he didn't make it. That softens the message on the way out the door and helps you forget all the stuff you saw before that. There has to be a way for Hollywood to solve this problem.
5 comments:
Man... I need to get commenting! My ranking is slipping!
OK, I'll offer a movie review, since that is the theme we've been working on with these last two posts.
I watched the movie "Idlewild" over the weekend. In case you are not familiar, it a movie produced or scored or something by Outkast. I bought the soundtrack last summer because I like Outkast.
Well, for some reason, most of the soundtrack music is not in the movie. In fact, there is a song from "The Love Below" album in the movie! The CD soundtrack was pretty decent (if you like Outkast with a jazzy twist), but the movie was pretty poor. The plot was thin and, like I said, the music was not great.
If you want good music, you should check out the Sound of Music. I hear it's pretty good. (Brandon, perhaps you could weigh in?)
Also, there's some sci-fi flick that I hear got pretty big. Sun Wars? Star Battles? I don't remember.
You know, I try to blame these musical encounters on my wife, but I'm starting to think that she is framing me on purpose. Let's relive a moment from the carpool this past week....
As we get in the car and turn it on, what station is the XM radio tuned to? Broadway Hits! And, of course, its belting out something sappy from Annie, or 42nd Street or something. I swear Kim drove the car last, but that didn't really help my cause.
What's wrong with cheap diamonds? I bought my wife's engagement ring out of a black leather briefcase at a truck stop. I got a hell of a deal, don’t know or care if it was bloody, hot, of came out of a bum’s ass, but it was real and I got a GREAT deal.
Well written article.
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