The politics of diamonds and the politics of protest are the subjects of two new movies up for consideration this week.
Edward Zwick is the man responsible for the cloying television series "Thirtysomething," but I won't hold that against him. Go figure the taste of the American couch potato.
After that series ended, Zwick started making movies, including Oscar-bait epics like "Courage Under Fire," "Glory," "The Last Samurai" and "The Siege."
All of these films have something in common: They all have a surfeit of pretentious ideals that are never quite properly formulated.
Well, Zwick is back with more pomposity and more endless seat-squirming. This time we are in Sierra Leone in 1999. A civil war is being waged by armed gangs funded by an illegal trade in what are called "blood diamonds." Hence, the name of the movie. Its action is rooted in angry, inhuman bloodshed that benumbs the audience. Innocent villagers are relentlessly slaughtered by their countrymen. How many savage machete attacks can you stomach?
The only truly good thing about "Blood Diamonds" is Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as Danny Archer, a Rhodesian smuggler. It's all about the sparkle for Archer. Caught by the cops for a transgression, he ends up sharing a prison cell with Djimon Hounsou's noble diamond slave. Hounsou's character has been separated from his wife and children by the bad guys and has been forced to pan for diamonds in a murky creek. He discovers a valuable chunk of rock that, once polished, would be a sensational pink diamond, worth a fortune. He hides it in the hope that someday it will help support his family.
Through awkward plotting, DiCaprio and Hounsou soon become friends -- not fast friends, not happy friends, just friends in a desire to retrieve the rock. Even in black Africa, it takes a white guy to help out a slave.
The endless movie -- it's nearly two and a half hours long -- repeatedly teeters on the brink of collapse as Zwick repeats his homage to the machine gun over and over and over. Think that group of villagers were horribly massacred? Think again and wait a few minutes. Zwick's got more for you to endure.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio, who is playing a bit of scamp (sort of like his Jack Dawson character from "Titanic," only beefier) butts heads with an American journalist played by Jennifer Connelly, who is the worst actress ever to win an Academy Award, and that's saying something.
After some pandering by diamond dealers and even more grotesque violence, the film reaches a peak, of sorts. No, not a climax -- an actual mountaintop. Will Hounsou rescue his son? Will he reunite his family? Will Danny and the journalist become lovers? You really don't want them to -- the girl has no oomph. The ending of the movie goes for the heartstrings, but Connelly is so lacking in emotional believability that the moment is like a whoosh of air shooting out of a sagging balloon.
"Blood Diamond" wants to be a grittier "Casablanca," but it ends up as a cubic zirconium.
Through a stroke of cinematic luck, a camera crew was following the Dixie Chicks in London, England, when one of the trio, Natalie Maines, at a concert at the Empire rock club, professed that she was ashamed to be from Texas because that's where President George W. Bush is from.
On its surface, that doesn't seem like such an inflammatory statement. It's OK to dislike a president -- something about freedom of speech. That sentence was captured on film by directors Barbara Kopple and Cecelia Peck, who were making a documentary about the popular, but hardly groundbreaking, female trio of country singers.
Where everything went bonkers for Maines was that she had her say just as Bush was rolling American troops into Iraq to overthrow the government and ferret out those weapons of mass destruction. Boy, isn't the passage of time an interesting thing?
Anyway, suddenly the Dixie Chicks were Public Enemy No. 1 and on the Republican hit-list, and I don't mean Top 40. Radio stations across the South refused to play their music, some folks tossed their Dixie Chicks CDs into trash bins, and threats of bodily harm were hurled at the female trio.
The movie "Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing" is a chronicle of the exile years. Truth be told, the trio became more popular than they ever were across the rest of the United States; it was just those pesky Southerners that stayed annoyed.
The ladies became the bestselling all-female band in music history by stepping away from their country roots and by putting a little rock 'n' roll boogie into their playlist. The movie follows the women on tour as they try to shake off the negative vibes. There are interviews with disc jockeys, fans, media types, producers, all nicely mixed with private moments of the Dixie Chicks with their family members, including their cute little children.
I wouldn't know a Dixie Chicks song if they came to my house and played one for me, but the film is an entertaining, music-filled work, never heavy-duty and always enlightening. For her part, Maines is seen returning to the scene of her verbal "crime" a few years later. She stands once again on the Empire stage in London and says she's still ashamed of Bush. That kind of toughness has got to be a Texas thing.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 12 2006 |