Blood Diamond

This holiday season, I have been seeing way too many violent films for my liking. Starting with Casino Royale, to Babel and Children of Men to finally, Blood Diamond. I can’t take the violence and brutality any more. It seems what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, is inspiring film makers to make descriptive, brutal movies, what is edited out of CNN’s broadcast is inflicted on us on the big screen.

Blood Diamond is about the diamond trade in Sierra Leone, where civil war has broken out between the rebels and the country’s leaders in an attempt to control the diamond trade. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a Rhodesian-born diamond smuggler who, having been orphaned during his native country’s violent struggles in the 1970s, has spent most of his 30-some years crisscrossing the continent as a soldier of fortune and a merchant of misery.

The New York Times has a searing review of the movie.

..this film betrays an almost quasi-touristic fascination with images of black Africans, who function principally as colorful scenery or, as in the gruesome scenes inside rebel training camps, manifestations of pure evil. Pure evil that, incidentally, likes to listen to rap and, in one case, wears a Snoop Dogg T-shirt along with his gat. Good as gold, Solomon earns a sizable share of screen time, and though the performance is expectedly sympathetic, the character has none of Danny’s complexity, which means that he’s inherently less interesting. Mr. Hounsou, who first came to attention as a noble African in “Amistad” and has often had to play the same role since, must be awfully tired of holding his head up so high.

The tragedy of Sierra Leone and the complicity of Americans, who buy more diamonds than any other consumers in the world, deserve louder, more clamorous attention than the occasional news report. And certainly big-budget Hollywood action films are plenty loud and plenty clamorous, and the volume is only turned up to shrieking with the addition of the international heartthrob who, by sacrificing himself on the altar of love in 1. “Titanic,” conquered a generation of young female fans (the same demographic most likely to brandish a rock on its ring finger).

Here is a link to a UN document that discusses conflict diamonds in Sierra Leone and Angola.