I went to watch the 'controversial' film, Blood Diamonds and I ended up snoozing most of it. I know wonder what the whole deal was about.
The film starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou, who plays the 'noble savage' role really well and will keep playing it it seems.
The film starts with Solomon Vandy (Hounsou) with his son Dia, who wants to be a doctor when he grows up, but of cause things go crazy when rebels arrive at their village and his family turn into refugees and his son becomes a child soldier. He finds a huge diamond, meets up with Danny Archer (DiCaprio) ,the bombs start flying and the running begins.
It was the small things I found annoying. The fact that the child soldiers all spoke with perfect English accents. The rebels spoke with a bad Nigerian accent and these were supposed to be people from Sierra Leone. The South African actors were probably told to stick with their accent because it's African right? And I don't even want to talk about Leo's accent and how bad it was. Actors normally spend months learning an accent or a dialect but when it comes to an African accent they're probably told anything dodgy is OK.
The other things that made me want to get the hell out of the cinema was the shallowness of the film. Zwick concentrated so much on the action that he forgot to make a meaningful film that actually had something to say! He just cut and pasted the bias you get from News agents like CNN about Africa and put Hollywood actors in it and called it a movie. The Africans were one dimension who were like lost little children who needed the help of the brave Westerners, or blood thirsty savages. Tell me, what else is new?
After watching it, I thought about the big PR campaign that our country, Botswana went into with De Beers. Our President was flying all over the world trying to sell our diamonds as non-conflict diamonds and now I'm wondering how all those millions spend on this campaign could have gone into our public services.
