Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

April 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 50

Total Comments: 20

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Blood Diamond / USA / 2006

A surprisingly hard faced look at the West African diamond trade, with DiCaprio in his best role for a very long time (perhaps ever) as an amoral and deeply unlikeable Rhodesian smuggler. It’s a shame the relationship between DiCaprio and fisherman Djimon Hounsou is shoved aside in the central act to make way for Jennifer Connelly’s predictably soft centred journalist: only in the final stages do they get the chance to indulge in some of the Defiant Ones style buddy banter that could have been one of the film’s real strong points.

I recently criticised both Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil and Oscar winner The Last King Of Scotland for telling African stories through white eyes, the excuse always being that producers won’t shell out for an African movie with a black hero. Blood Diamond pulls the same trick, but manages to get away with it: this is an important contemporary issue which needs to reach as wide an audience as possible, and when the star of the film is Leonardo DiCaprio that’s pretty much guaranteed.

by Tom Huddleston | Source: DVD
29 Apr 2007 3:00 PM | Submit Comment

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