Good blood, bad blood

Rating: 9/10 (22 May 2007)

Disclaimer: This is not an autobiography of yours truly. This is the review of a great movie  blood diamond. Details, facts, information are a strict no-no in this review, so if you were looking for the standard monotony of all that, try elsewhere! First of all, I would like to push this article back to my childhood days please. All right thanks! English class - I was taught one tongue twister. I didn't realize the value of it then, nor did I say it right when I tried to say it fast. Today I know what I was taught in four simple words  good blood, bad blood.
Then I learnt science in class  the arteries bring the blood from various parts of the human body to the heart for purifying.
I tried relating my lessons to this movie and this is what I came up with: THE BLOOD-LINE The veins bring the blood to the heart and to the rest of the body.
Danny Archer (Leo di Caprio) was one such vein, smuggling and supplying the diamonds mined by the slaves to the prospective buyers (obviously white men).
The blood in this context is the diamonds which are mined and dug by the slaves in Africa. They pay with their lives if they try to escape a stone; they are worse off anyway by finding one.
One such enslaved family is that of Solomon Vandy (played by Djimon Hounsou). For those who are bad at history like me (and for all those nerds out there making quizzes and stuff), look up the history of Sierra Leone.
Solomon is forced to work in the diamond fields while his son is being taken by the "terrorists", or typically the bad guys who teach the kids to smoke marijuana and kill relentlessly and mercilessly without reason. Now Solomon finds a diamond stone big enough to make a person choke (but honestly I thought it looked rather small), and everyone is after it.
How Danny goes after it by making a deal with Solomon to redeem his family and life in exchange for the diamond forms the rest of the movie. Along the way, they meet Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connely), a reporter who is rather nosy and manages to fall in between the danger and the love that both she and Danny never had in their lives.
I don't know how emotionally or otherwise Danny and the reporter got linked, but even while waging the war of words, they fall in love. Leo di Caprio seems to do what he does best  save die a martyr in all his movies  Titanic, The Departed and Blood Diamond. That seems to be a pattern with Leo movies, but we still love it  makes him dearer to us, doesn't it? One quote worth remembering from the film is where Danny meets the reporter in the island; I forgot it anyway but Leo puts across the truth of how the white women wanting the diamond rings for their weddings are the reason for the blood diamonds.
TO ADD MORE VEIN TO THIS REVIEW Man's obsession for metal has always been against nature; just as man himself has been and will continue to be. Science couldn't figure out the stark predation for these shiny little things. The whole thing has only advanced so much that he can kill another of his kith and kin for obtaining the silly stone and proceed to find his happiness.
This movie is just about that  how man goes against his own brotherhood to proclaim what he calls  happiness, which in reality is foolhardiness to follow one's eyes and not the heart or mind.
Along the course of this voyage there are people who pass on the stone across the bridge, under the table and what lies beneath is just grit, grime and dirty blood.
Good blooded ones were slaved by the bad blooded ones, asked to mined (mind?) their own business. And in this case, anything to do with blood has to do with matters of the heart, literally! This movie also gives way to a fact of life  that the heart purifies bad blood into good blood  just as Danny Archer found out at the end of the movie.
Well, I definitely didn't get any wiser with my tongue-twister, but I most certainly managed to spin a yarn with it enough to end this review thus: I have always been a rebel in my family  I didn't know why humans were longing after a shiny piece of metal. I did not know what joy it gave them, but after watching this movie, I know this  one man's blood is another man's diamond (or gold or any metal for that matter!!). I know de Beers or any jeweler would be after my "blood" after reading this review, but remember that in the end, Good Blood always prevails!