Blood Diamond
Genre: Adventure/Drama/Thriller
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly
Director: Edward Zwick
Release: (2006)
Blood Diamond is a fantastic movie that every guy should be aware of – though not for the reasons you might assume. As a movie, it’s pretty decent, but if used correctly it may be indispensable. Let me cover the movie junk first and then we can get down to the X’s and O’s of using it to run the old BDTD (Blood Diamond Trap Door).
Blood Diamond is more than just an action-packed thriller. It’s a smart and insightful expose that blows the lid off an international conspiracy between corporations and politicians to invest in the death and suffering of a noble and innocent people and profit from the callous exploitation of their land. Pardon me for a moment.
(Excuse me, Mr. DiCaprio? Did I get that right? Ok, just checking. I just cut and pasted most of it from the clippings of Syriana and Lord of War, but I totally mean it about your movie. No, no I mean it! You totally proved everything. That forty-five second montage of a bunch of shady exchanges taking place, with your narration of how all the diamond smuggling in the world takes place, was, like, the truth that the corporate media doesn’t want anyone to know about. And when you described about how everything went through “offshore holding companies” to keep the fat cats looking clean, I was just like, ‘Whoa’. ‘Cause how could you make that stuff up, right? It’s, like, too detailed. Oh, wait, I almost forgot about this review. I gotta go, but everything’s cool so far, right? Alright. You’re a great man, Mr. DiCaprio, a great man. Good luck tonight.).
Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah, Blood Diamond is a gritty and alarming look inside a world of greed and corruption in a modern day colonization effort that needs to be … to be … blah bleeh blah blue …ok, he’s gone. Alright I only have a few minutes while Leo’s out getting his highlights touched up for the big, secret Gore/Nader pre-campaign cocktail party tonight at the Beckhams’. So let’s make this quick.
The plot of Blood Diamond is fairly straightforward. Leo stars as Danny Archer, a grizzled South African diamond smuggler who’s made a niche for himself as a go-between, running diamonds and payoffs back and forth between corporate interests and whatever militia happens to be in control of the mines at any given time. When an international investigation is launched into the atrocities committed in the name of controlling the diamond market, the corporations act quickly to sever all ties with him and Archer is left hanging in Africa, looking for one last payday to get him out for good. On an overnight stint in a local jail, Archer overhears the story of a Mende tribesman named Solomon Vandy (Djimon Honsou), whose family was captured and kidnapped in a raid of his village, but who is also rumored to have smuggled an enormous diamond out of the fields and hidden it to retrieve for himself later. Archer quickly strikes up a partnership with Vandy, promising to use his own connections among “white people” to help him get his family back in return for a split on the profit from the eponymous blood diamond. Along the way they meet up with Maddy Brown (Jennifer Connelly), an international journalist who has come to Africa to play the unnecessary love interest in Danny’s life so that the plot can be further diluted to try to appeal to more demos. Oddly, that’s exactly how she introduces herself to Danny in the scene where they first meet at a bar.
This is really not a bad movie, in fact it’s fairly fun to watch. And I understand that the tactics employed by monopolistic international diamond purveyors, such as the one that rhymes with BeDeers, have historically ranged anywhere from unethical to malicious. But what I don’t need is to keep being spoon fed morality tales about the global crisis-du-jour of the rich and bored, broken up into shiny, blasty, kissy nuggets, because they presume I’ve never read a book or gone to a website beyond TMZ and wouldn’t be interested in a humanitarian crisis involving scary foreigners any other way. We get it, Hollywood, you’re citizens of the world. We know, people are poor. People are starving. People are exploited. The average surface temperature of the Earth has gone up one whole degree in the last century and there are polar bears stuck on floating ice chunks all over the place. Guess what, you don’t need to make $20 million dollars a year to afford NPR – we all get it. And, believe it or not, a lot of us spend plenty of time thinking about how we can help these things all the time. Can you please just go back to being the distraction from this troubled world that we pay you unconscionable amounts of money to be?
And even if we were incapable of accessing these stories on our own, what makes you think these types of movies would make anything seem more real to us? Let me get this straight: You’re going to tell me that a chubby-cheeked, pasty-shouldered, smooth-featured, doughy-looking white guy with continuously impeccable, highlighted hair is a realistic likeness of a hardened, sun-scorched, jungle diamond smuggler/ruthless former Rhodesian mercenary? Or that a supermodel-looking starlet with bleached-white teeth and always just enough make-up is an accurate depiction of an investigative journalist who has been living in a barren shack in the sweltering wilds of Africa for months? Why, because she pulls her hair back in a pony-tail once? And, yet, despite these efforts to punch-up the sexiness of all the characters, I’m supposed to believe that all of the details of your sophisticated, multinational conspiracy are straight out of the records of a tax audit or something? Sure! Why not?
Hey, and I’m just tossing this out there, but how about just making the movies for fun and, in your free time, maybe putting a little effort into fixing up your own town before you try to save the whole world. Your fee for one stinking picture would be enough to provide full college scholarships to an entire generation of elementary school students in Inglewood, maybe even providing them with a motivation to work hard and stay in school that they could never have otherwise hoped for. Oh, wait, that’s right – you’re only looking for trendy international causes that get a lot of press and that people will forget about after a while but will remember your face in the crusade. Especially ones that throw the spotlight way overseas and keep it away from the massive inequities you live with right here at home. Riiight, nothing close enough to home where people can actually see if anything changes or not after your photo ops. Alright, forget that idea. And Leo, I hope you know I’m not at all just talking about you – you just happen to be the one catching this right now.
But, there is good news for everyone here. As I mentioned, there is at least one truly great cause that Blood Diamond can contribute to, and that is the economic relief associated with running the BDTD. Here’s how it works: Whether it’s totally accurate or not, Blood Diamond tells an emotionally evocative tale of the atrocities behind the diamond trade. Families gunned down, limbs chopped off, mothers and daughters raped and killed, sons kidnapped and brainwashed, villages burned and all kinds of lives destroyed. And they go out of there way to associate the blame with the demand of superficial American women for their big, shiny engagement rings. So – here’s the play. Guys, if you find yourself in a developing relationship, keep this movie in your back pocket. Go out of your way to be sure that the two of you don’t rent it too early on, wait until things start getting really serious and the marriage talk is kicking in. Right around then, just casually “happen” to pick this out and watch it together one night. If she has any emotional bone in her body, she’ll be horrified and open the door to a conversation where you can pin her down into admitting that she wouldn’t want a big, expensive ring if that’s how they’re made. Next thing you know, maybe a few days later, bam! You’re in there proposing to her with a $99 cubic zirconium ring and telling her the story about how you had actually bought a huge diamond ring a few weeks before, but after your conversation the other night you couldn’t stop thinking about all the suffering it caused and that you returned it for this because you knew it was the right thing to do. What’s she gonna say? And if every man in the country that gets away with this donates at least half of the difference that they would have spent on a ring to charity, well I’d say this movie can absolutely make a difference. Oh, shoot, here he comes. Pretend we were talking about corn fuel or something.
(Oh, hey, hi Mr. DiCaprio. The highlights look great. Let me see the back? Oh wow, yeah those look amazing! Huh? Oh us, we were just talking about Blood Diamond still and how - as soon as the airlines convert to ethanol - we totally want to go over and fix that stuff. It was so inspirational. What, no, I haven’t seen that yet but I’m just dieing to. I heard it’s mind-blowing. It’ll probably save the world. You’re a great man, Mr. DiCaprio, a great man.
Grading
Story: B (Should have been an A, without the romance angle and preachiness)
Acting: A- (With the curve brought way up by Honsou)
Visuals: A
Originality/Innovation: C+ (Different story, same format as any other liberal-guilt infomercial)
Enjoyability: B
Overall: B+
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