Overrated Hollywood Politics

Rating: 5/10 (24 June 2008)

This movie has been out awhile, and I just watched it on DVD.
First of all, the cinematography is just wonderful. Africa is one of my favorite settings. It's exotic and intriguing and always presents itself as a highly adventurous place. Kudos there.
The story here in Blood Diamond is very violent, reflecting the instability of African "nations." Of course, this instability is heightened by the standard Hollywood political claptrap that the world is being victimized and that some white Hollywood actor/writer/director/producer is going to set it straight by providing their take on the world situation. Let's face it, most of these people who put these types of movies together are morons who cannot give a good account of their own private, shallow lifestyles let alone depict and preach on how bad the outside world is.
Oh, if we could all be just like Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie and Madonna and just go to Africa and adopt starving black kids. That's is so Christlike. Wow, aren't we angelic? So, the politics in this movie are just over-the-top, so much, in fact, that the movie becomes more of a self-absorbed white crusade to make the world "right", rather than a movie that details people caught up in a story about the despicable diamond market. Leonardo di Caprio goes through his tirade about how this evil works, in a bid to show how angelic his character is, when, actually, his character is the most despicable by far. Then, of course, we have the typical American beauty, Connelly, who appears just to somehow make a bid on how the white world is sooooooooo sensitive to the plight of self-destructive Africaans.
This movie is overrated and was promoted so well by the Hollywood propaganda machine, it actually was a hit. Garnered 5 Academy Award nominations? For what? Di Caprio's stilted accent?