Seeing

There's a movie review coming. First, an aside: Channel flipping this weekend I came across the movie Timeline, based on the formulaic but entertaining Michael Crichton novel. I had wanted to see how they turned book into movie but heard outcome was rather poor, so it seemed a good Sunday afternoon freetime flick. Yup, book got lost in the transfer (which if you know the story has double meaning). But that wasn't the point I planned to make. One of the characters was played by Tony Blair, or rather the actor who had quite ably portrayed Tony Blair in The Queen. He's rather distinctive looking and I commented to David how strange it was that I had no recollection of having seen him in anything and then he appears in two movies in a row I'd watched. Well, he is also in Blood Diamond. How weird is that? Three movies in a row. Michael Sheen--keep an eye out for him.

MOVIE REVIEW
Blood Diamond stars Leonardo DiCaprio in yet another action adventure message movie about good and bad coexisting and there being no easy answers. Well, apart from the apparently easy choices of protecting innocent lives and not coveting falsely rare diamonds. David commented that the backstory introduction about unrest in Sierra Leone was simplistic. At the end I asked him for his view on the accuracy and he conceded the movie was pretty good. So I can with an informed spirit tell you I recommend this movie. It's got violence and guns and lots of dead people (some bad/corrupted men and boys, and lots of innocent people). There is not one sex scene (David guessed it wouldn't be fitting the style of the movie and he was right). DiCaprio and Djimon Honsou are good; the secondary characters are thoroughly predictable types.

Oh, what's it all about? It's just your everyday quest for life, peace, wealth, justice--in shifting order. The journey focuses on two men. Denny Archer is a diamond smuggler in the diamonds-for-weapons trade of Africa (movie serves as passionate introduction to conflict diamonds). Archer lives by a fatalist philosophy of TIA--"This is Africa". He encounters an idealistic, adventure-seeking, comely female American reporter (played by Jennifer Connelly) who wants Denny's story; she's frustrated that nothing meaningful about this horrid business can be fact checked for publication (Her part is I suppose necessary to story but frustratingly simplistic). She sees the good in Denny, though he's not so ready to be good. Then there's Solomon, a nice African villager whose world falls apart one day when the Revolutionary United Front come and take him away, destroy his village, then take his promising young son into their arms (a nice play on words I did there). Solomon is forced to pan for diamonds in Kono, where he finds and hides a massive pink diamond. Denny learns of this diamond and convinces Solomon to take him to it so they both can get what they want.

As the Rolling Stones pointed out, "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime, well you just might find, you get what you need." Blood Diamond is a bit preachy in spots, and the violence is brutal, but it rings true, and the pace and story keep you interested. I liked the complexity of the two main characters and the focus on important world events that don't get even the "one minute on CNN" that Connelly's reporter character predicts for them.