Tages
01-30-2007, 06:31 PM
I originally wrote this rant on another thread, but to avoid derailment decided to put it here instead.
"Blood Diamond" is one of the most unbearably pretentious, absurdly overblown monuments to hypocrisy I've ever seen. I detested every minute of it. If this were a low-budget film school project it would be written off as a self-congratulatory exercise in intellectual masturbation, but it's a major studio release with an advertising budget, so of course the Academy has little issue in nominating it for awards.
Hey, Hollywood, here's a novel idea. I know all of you are trying to make yourself a nice back-patting movie about the plight of the poor brown people you love to pretend to care about. But why is it that your heart is big enough to make the movie yet falls just yea short of the enlightenment necessary to give the lead role to a minority? Instead, we get two white Americans as leads, because lord knows we wouldn't dream of trusting those stupid Middle Americans to empathize with minority leads in a movie set in a foreign country.
But no, the fun doesn't stop there! We get Leonardo DiCaprio, channeling his performance from "Gangs of New York" where he can't seem to pick an accent and stick with it. He's supposed to be Afrikaaner South African, but the last I checked, Afrikaaner-accented English sounds distinctly different from a Virginia, Irish, or New England accent, all of which DiCaprio showcases at some point during the movie, sometimes in the same sentence. He gets to do his best to play the world's best-manicured world-weary mercenary and make googly eyes at Jennifer Connoly, who apparently forgot she was supposed to be interesting. Djimon Hounsou gives the only decent performance.
But let's face it, if they had given the greatest performances in the history of the English language it wouldn't make the movie any good. The material is fucking awful. Apparently we're supposed to take this movie as an anti-violence sermon even as it painstakingly fetishizes each and every shrapnel tear and bullet wound to an almost pornographic extreme. This is why this movie is a hypocritical piece of crap. Warfare in West Africa looks remarkably like an over-stylized MTV video, apparently, the experience so numbed by the hipper-than-thou camera moves and a soundtrack with all the subtlety of a bleeding head wound that it loses all possibility to inspire anything in the audience other than boredom.
But at least it's a timely, important message, right? Well, actually, the Western diamond companies have made significant progress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_Process_Certification_Scheme) in making sure they don't fund warlords by buying blood diamonds anymore. The movie obviously doesn't care that much since it doesn't go to any effort whatsoever to explain to us how to avoid buying blood diamonds anyway. No one who knows of the existence of blood diamonds is going to walk out of this movie knowing anything more than what they did going in.
That's not what these movies are for, though. They are not out to make a difference. They are out to make sure we know that the people who made them really, really care. And I'll be showing my appreciation for this sentiment by crossing my fingers that this piece of shit film loses every single Oscar it was nominated for and is forgotten for all time.
"Blood Diamond" is one of the most unbearably pretentious, absurdly overblown monuments to hypocrisy I've ever seen. I detested every minute of it. If this were a low-budget film school project it would be written off as a self-congratulatory exercise in intellectual masturbation, but it's a major studio release with an advertising budget, so of course the Academy has little issue in nominating it for awards.
Hey, Hollywood, here's a novel idea. I know all of you are trying to make yourself a nice back-patting movie about the plight of the poor brown people you love to pretend to care about. But why is it that your heart is big enough to make the movie yet falls just yea short of the enlightenment necessary to give the lead role to a minority? Instead, we get two white Americans as leads, because lord knows we wouldn't dream of trusting those stupid Middle Americans to empathize with minority leads in a movie set in a foreign country.
But no, the fun doesn't stop there! We get Leonardo DiCaprio, channeling his performance from "Gangs of New York" where he can't seem to pick an accent and stick with it. He's supposed to be Afrikaaner South African, but the last I checked, Afrikaaner-accented English sounds distinctly different from a Virginia, Irish, or New England accent, all of which DiCaprio showcases at some point during the movie, sometimes in the same sentence. He gets to do his best to play the world's best-manicured world-weary mercenary and make googly eyes at Jennifer Connoly, who apparently forgot she was supposed to be interesting. Djimon Hounsou gives the only decent performance.
But let's face it, if they had given the greatest performances in the history of the English language it wouldn't make the movie any good. The material is fucking awful. Apparently we're supposed to take this movie as an anti-violence sermon even as it painstakingly fetishizes each and every shrapnel tear and bullet wound to an almost pornographic extreme. This is why this movie is a hypocritical piece of crap. Warfare in West Africa looks remarkably like an over-stylized MTV video, apparently, the experience so numbed by the hipper-than-thou camera moves and a soundtrack with all the subtlety of a bleeding head wound that it loses all possibility to inspire anything in the audience other than boredom.
But at least it's a timely, important message, right? Well, actually, the Western diamond companies have made significant progress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_Process_Certification_Scheme) in making sure they don't fund warlords by buying blood diamonds anymore. The movie obviously doesn't care that much since it doesn't go to any effort whatsoever to explain to us how to avoid buying blood diamonds anyway. No one who knows of the existence of blood diamonds is going to walk out of this movie knowing anything more than what they did going in.
That's not what these movies are for, though. They are not out to make a difference. They are out to make sure we know that the people who made them really, really care. And I'll be showing my appreciation for this sentiment by crossing my fingers that this piece of shit film loses every single Oscar it was nominated for and is forgotten for all time.