Blood Diamond (***1/2)

 ? A huge stone found in a Sierra Leone diamond mine offers tantalizing possibilities, and danger, for the conscripted laborer (Djimon Hounsou) who found it as well as a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a journalist (Jennifer Connelly) with whom he crosses paths. The African country’s recent civil war forms the backdrop for this thriller that shows how diamonds are used to finance civil wars.

+ This isn’t a sprawling, globe-hopping movie in the manner of Traffic or Syriana. But for a movie that doesn’t try to do too much, it does give a remarkably good primer on the seediest side of the global diamond business while managing, in a subplot, to illustrate how child soldiers are “recruited” and indoctrinated. The corporation that buys the “conflict diamonds” called Van De Kamp, is an obvious stand-in for DeBeers. (It would make a whole other fascinating feature or documentary to look at the history of that company, which virtually created the market for diamond jewels and uses its near-monopoly power to regulate their scarcity.) I should mention that the movie is surprisingly action-oriented. Although Hounsou’s character’s story is the thread that the plot follows, DiCaprio’s character is the pivotal one. With this on top of his recent effort in Departed, the one-time Titanic pretty boy continues to demonstrate his versatility. (It took me a few minutes to get used to DiCaprio’s South African accent, which the South Africans on the IMDB message board seem to approve.) The movie doesn’t work if he’s an unbridled villain, but would also have seemed false if he’d turned into a Peace Corps liberal. Instead, he’s the kind of movie character you can discuss afterward and reasonably come to different conclusions about. Director Ed Zwick (Glory), who shot in Mozambique and South Africa, also captures the natural beauty of the land.

- I’m not sure where it would have fit, but perhaps a minute or so where someone explained the history of the tiny country where the movie is set would have been useful. However, at 143 minutes, the movie feels the tiniest bit bloated.

= ***1/2 This is one of the most powerful movies of the year. It’s a “problem” film that doesn’t come off as preachy. It’s also nice to see this and other recent mainstream films being set in Africa, both for the novelty and because it humanizes a place largely unfamiliar to most Americans.

IMDb link

Lord of War (**3/4)

This tries to do for the arms trade what Traffic did for drug dealing, though Blow, the Johnny Depp film, is probably a better antecedent. Nicholas Cage is the title character, who narrates his own rise from Ukranian immigrant to world-class gun peddler. The weapons trade is as worthy of examination as the drug trade, and I wanted to see this movie. I was never bored watching the story, but I never really felt like I’d learned much about the arms trade, the way I’d felt like I’d learning something about the drug trade after watching Traffic or Blow. To his credit, writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1mOne) never romanticizes his main character (a flaw in Blow), but neither does he provide the details that make such a character completely believable. For example, his fluency in Chinese and other languages is explained by saying that he had a gift for picking them up, as if a few chats with a foreign arms dealer would do the job.

Nor does Niccol go very far in explaining the motivations of wealthy nations in the arms industry, or the kinds of moral complexities that evil creates. The mostly Third World victims of war are shown as faceless hordes, though a fictional Liberian dictator is vividly portrayed. Bridget Moynihan plays a counterpart to Catherine Zeta-Jones’s role in Traffic, the trophy wife who’s happy not knowing the source of her lavish lifestyle. Ethan Hawke plays the lone lawman trying to get the goods on Cage.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/22/05 and posted 11/19/13