Movie Review: Blood Diamond

I believe a movie can make itself valuable simply by telling an important sory. The new action thriller Blood Diamond starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly tells the story of diamonds mined in Africa by rebels and terrorists and sold to fund dictatorships, genocide and terrorism. This is a story that has been ignored to long and just telling it lends a certain gravitas to Blood Diamond.

That said, the film is still, for the most part, a packaged Hollywood product. An action thriller with plenty of bullets, blood and bombs going off. The action is high octane but because the story is so true and so sobering it's difficult to accept the giddy thrill that such slick Hollywood action often elicits. This leaves one with a mostly mixed impression of the well intended Blood Diamond.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars in Blood Diamond as Danny Archer; a diamond smuggler who acts as the go between for terrorists and warlords and the diamond syndicates in London and America who purchase the so called "Conflict Diamonds", diamonds often covered with the blood of innocent africans. As the movie notes, more than 15 percent of diamonds sold in world are conflict diamonds and the billions of dollars made off of the sale of these diamonds is funding terrorism and genocide throughout Africa.

Danny Archer does not take much time to reflect on his ethics. The opportunistic Danny is constantly searching for a score and when he happens on a farmer named Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) who escaped forced labor at a rebel diamond mine after he stashed a rare pink diamond, Danny seizes the opportunity. Offering to help reunite Solomon with his family, made refugees by a rebel attack, Solomon reluctantly agrees to lead Danny to the diamond.

Joining the search is an idealistic journalist named Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) who is after Danny in search of proof of the link between conflict diamonds and the world's leading diamond dealer. Using her connections, Maddy gets Danny and Solomon back to the jungles where Solomon hid the diamond, in exchange Danny gives her the story she is looking for.

Ed Zwick, the director behind The Last Samurai and Courage Under Fire, directs Blood Diamond with a great care for the reality of this disturbing story. That means he had to be true to the horrific violence that surrounds the African diamond trade. Blood Diamond is brutally violent in depicting how rebel forces recruit their slave labor workforce. Women and children are murdered indiscriminately while able bodied men are either tortured or forced to work in the mines. Limbs are lopped off at will and children are recruited to become warriors with machine guns.

These images are disturbing and shocking and yet; as presented by  Ed Zwick they have a certain Hollywood slickness to them. There is a puncturing of the reality of these scenes because Zwick and cinematographer Eduardo Serra choose to shoot the film on traditional film stock. If ever a subject called for the gritty realistic look of handheld digital it's Blood Diamond. Shot as a traditional Hollywood picture the highly stylized and clean photography of Blood Diamond undercuts the brutal story being told.

The disconnect is jarring. At once you are watching a classic Hollywood action film with guns and explosions that usually illicit giddy thrills but here are tempered by a very serious sobering subject. Blood Diamond is an experience that is difficult to enjoy and indeed may not have meant to be enjoyable as a typical popcorn program picture. Yet the film looks; and the action feels like a typical Hollywood action epic.

Aside from the important subject, the reason to see Blood Diamond is the performance of Leonardo DiCaprio. Evincing a tough guy menace that is unexpected of him, even after his similar tough guy role in The Departed, Dicaprio delivers a powerful performance that is far more complex and unique than most action movie heroes.

Really; DiCaprio's Danny Archer is no hero, he is as much a villain as he is a brave man. When he decides to go for the diamond he is opportunistic and cold blooded and when called upon to be heroic, DiCaprio plays the conflicted nature of Danny Archer extraordinarily well.

Director Ed Zwick preached his way through The Last Samurai and Courage Under Fire and The Siege, hammering home ham fisted points about the complicated measures of patriotism with in your face earnestness. He can't resist doing a little more preaching in Blood Diamond, even when preaching about a seemingly unrelated topic like the war in Iraq.

In a minor and slightly humorous scene, Djimon Hounsou has a brief conversation with a lost villager who laments the violence of the diamond trade but hopes they never discover oil in Africa or else they will be in real trouble. A darkly funny exchange but an entirely unnecessary scene.

I am recommending Blood Diamond based on the important story it tells and the performance of Leonardo DiCaprio. His is a performance that is worth of the the buzz that has Leo vs Leo at the Oscars in March; with his performance in Blood Diamond versus his performance in The Departed. I don't see that happening but both performances are more than worthy of Academy consideration.

Blood Diamond is a flawed Hollywood action picture that garners unwarranted importance from its subject matter. That is a subject that desperately needs public attention does manage to redeem what is otherwise just another Hollywood action movie.

Movie Review: K-Pax

K-Pax (2001) 

Directed by Iain Softley 

Written by Charles Leavitt 

Starring Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Alfre Woodard, Mary McCormack

Release Date August 13th, 2001 

Published November 1st, 2001 

Kevin Spacey is one our finest actors having created such enduring characters as American Beauty's Lester Burnham, Seven's John Doe, and the unforgettable Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects (My personal favorite). But no matter how great the actor, he can't get it right every time. Need I remind you of Pay it Forward, and now with K-Pax Spacey has struck out again. High hopes still persist for his role in The Shipping News in December.

You can't blame Spacey entirely for the failure of K-Pax -- director Iain Softley and the screenwriter must share equal blame. They seemed to approach the film with no idea how they would resolve it which leaves the audience with an ending so unsatisfying it collapses any interesting elements the film had built to that point.

K-Pax is the story of Prot (Spacey) a man who's either an alien or a mental patient. Prot is picked up by police at the scene of a mugging after babbling about not being from Earth. He is placed in a mental institution where Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges, in the film's best performance) treats him. K Pax is at its best when Bridges and Spacey go one on one with Bridge's doctor attempting to logically ascertain why this seemingly brilliant man thinks he is an alien. 

The film's other scenes are less interesting featuring your typical cast of loony bin loonies such as the germophobe, the mean one, and the patient who could leave the hospital if someone would treat him with love instead of medicine. Of course Prot will redeem them and these scenes are lifted from the Patch Adams scrap heap though slightly elevated by Spacey's presence. 

Jeff Bridge's performance nearly saves K Pax his search for Prot's true identity is well played with the right amount of emotional impact. Bridges is stringing together one of the most under-appreciated resumes in the business with brilliant turns in The Contender, The Big Lebowski and Fearless. If all of K-Pax were as good as he is, K-Pax could have been one of the best films of the year.

As for Spacey, Prot is a nearly impossible character who's required to be quirky because all aliens are quirky, and he's required to be psychologically damaged and then be a saint. That's a lot of work. In the end the director refuses to give the audience any catharsis by not answering the film's big question, one I won't print because I don't want to spoil it. The ending is left open either for a sequel or to offer the audience the opportunity to write their own ending, but intelligent moviegoers may be annoyed with the mystery. I know I was.

Movie Review Seventh Son

Seventh Son (2015) 

Directed by Sergei Bodrov

Written by Charles Leavitt, Steven Knight

Starring Jeff Bridge, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes, Alicia Vikander, Kit Harrington, Olivia Williams, Djimon Hounsou 

Release Date February 6th, 2015 

Published February 5th, 2015

There is a sad and desperate affliction plaguing middle aged Hollywood stars. I’ve come to call it “Nicolas-Cage-Itis.” NCI, as we will henceforth refer to it, strikes when an actor reaches of a level of age and stardom where they are no longer seen as viable leading men but can’t pull themselves from in front of the camera.

The dissonance between their faded place in the pop ephemera and their own perception of their pop mortality clash and a level of madness emerges that leads to making movies of questionable taste and quality. John Cusack, for one, has succumbed mightily to NCI and will in 2015 star in a film project so bereft it likely will never be seen outside of China.

Other actors look on the verge of an NCI flare up, Johnny Depp is perilously close, Keanu Reeves seems to have pulled back from the brink but still could go either way and Tom Cruise is just one batshit crazy sci-fi movie from a full blown case. Sadly, however, the most recent fully diagnosed case of NCI is Academy Award winner and all around good dude Jeff Bridges.

With his “RIPD,” “The Giver,” and “Seventh Son” triumvirate it’s clear Bridges is in the throes of a full on Nicolas-Cage-Itis breakdown. He’s already begun the ‘bizarre accents are why I make movies’ phase of the illness. Soon, he will be experimenting with his hairline and having massive tax problems.

“Seventh Son” was the final piece of the NCI diagnosis. This misbegotten YA adventure movie stars Bridges as a mystical witch hunter named Master Gregory and while you might be tempted to believe Bridges wanted to play a mystical witch hunter named Master Gregory on a lark, it’s clear he chose the role because he was allowed to speak in a manner of his choosing, something akin to Morgan Freeman without teeth.

Yes, the accent is really the only reason Bridges wanted to play Master Gregory. Any director indulgent enough to allow his star to mush mouth his way through an ostensibly teen-friendly blockbuster adventure clearly isn’t asking much of his star. No, Bridges and his star power quite clearly dominate every aspect of “Seventh Son” which means nothing too challenging and only the vaguest sense that anyone gives the slightest damn about the material.

Joining Bridges with her own mild case of NCI is Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore. Bridges’ Lady Friend from “The Big Lebowski” plays a witch that Gregory once loved, then hunted and now hunts again after she escapes from the prison he made her years before. The love story aspect is left thankfully to the willing imagination as the movie is given over to high camp vamping and the chewing of scenery.

It’s difficult to decide what is more dispiriting about “Seventh Son:” Bridges and Moore’s dull, camp excess or the abysmal love story tacked on to their teenage sidekicks. Ben Barnes Barnes and Alicia Vikander play star-crossed lovers, witch-hunter apprentice and witch, respectively, with about as much romantic chemistry as mismatched shelving units. If you need a sense of just how invested the film is in Barnes’ apprentice character, his name is Tom Ward. Tom Ward. “Seventh Son” is set in a world of Witches, Dragons and shape shifting Bears and Leopards and they are battled by a guy named Tom. At least Gregory gets call himself ‘Master.’

“Seventh Son” is an incredibly depressing piece of work. It’s a YA adaptation, it’s dreary and lumbering with about as much wonder and excitement as a trip to the DMV. But, of course, the dreariest of the dreary is watching Jeff Bridges entertain himself. Bridges is playing an elaborate prank that’s only funny for him. He’s fully aware of how ridiculous he looks and sounds but he’s also wildly entertained by it. We, on the other hand, are just hurt that our hero won’t let us in on the joke.

Mr. Bridges’s case of NCI is in that hermetic stage where a selfish negation of all outside opinion leads to humiliating career decisions that the star doesn’t fully realize they’re making. NCI blinds the star from seeing how silly they look and consequently divorces them from reality enough that they take a strange pride in their own oddity.

Can Mr. Bridges recover from this devilish disease? It’s hard to say. The progenitor of NCI, Nicolas Cage Esquire, does, on occasion, allow his talent to emerge from behind his lunacy but seemingly only by accident. Maybe it will be by accident that we will once again see Mr. Bridges. For now, sadly, his NCI has fully overtaken his good sense and “Seventh Son” is the signifier of his full blown madness.