oh man, we went to see another critically acclaimed film last night, blood diamond, starring leonardo dicaprio, jennifer connelly and djimon hounso. the movie is about the illegal trade of diamonds from war torn countries, to fund combatants on either side, or another side all together. we missed the start of the film (not so lucky this time, especially so, i may have been booked for speeding), so didn't work out that it was based in sierra leone until later in the film. i don't think we missed too much though, probably just where the story was based, and exactly what was going on at the start (i think it was based around late 90's, when clinton was impeached). big spoiler, unlike normal reviews, i have actually posted a fair amount of the plot here.
it follows dicaprio (archer) and hounso (vandy), as one tries to find a diamond to get out of africa, and the other tries to find his family. leonardo dicaprio puts on another accent in this one, he's from zimbabwe, it works to an extent i guess, you don't really notice it too much. at the start, vandy is working in a rebel-run mine, where he finds a huge diamond, and hides it, before escaping from a military attack. in the same jail cell, archer finds out about the diamond, and proceeds to find out more, and to get vandy to help him find it.
jennifer connelly (bowen) plays a journalist trying to get the story linking the illegal diamond trade to the big diamond dealer in london. she eventually gets archer to tell her the story in exchange for helping vandy find his family. they do all this, after escaping from the rebel attack on the capital city, and then escaping from them numerous other times (doding a lot of bullets).
eventually, they find vandy's family, but find that his son has been conscripted as a child soldier in the rebel army. so while archer is looking for the diamond, vandy is looking for his son. lo and behold, they find both, back at the original mine. archer calls for an air strike from his old war leader (secret african mercenary army), they dodge more bullets, and manage to save vandy's son, and find the diamond. after that, archer does actually die, vandy gets the money for the diamond, and bowen gets the story of the diamonds.
despite, the slightly hard-to-believe close shaves, and long trek through the african country/bush/jungle, the film was good to watch. i never really got any of those it's going on a bit moments, it highlights a lot of the problems in africa, and tells an interesting story. another film with a lot of violence, everything seems to have that nowadays (since there aren't a lot of awesome comedies floating about), but i definitely think it was a good film, and worth watching.
picture taken from wikipedia.
#33 dtra (david tran)
Last edited at 5:01 8th-mar-2007
i'd also like to mention that alf tripped over the stairs as we were leaving, flat on his face (virtually), and also this erratic driver before we got to knox, trying to reverse into me. all in all, a pretty ridiculous night of dtra's aussie adventures.
dtra
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6:58 4th-mar-2007