24 February 2008

Blood Diamond (2006)

Today was a stay-at-home day for me, which means I spent the whole day indoors in my house. The main thing I did today was watch the movie Blood Diamond. What's the verdict? It's a good movie. I watched the movie with my mom. I suspect my mom wanted to watch this movie because she liked watching Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic and wanted to see him again. Before the movie started, I tried to warn my mom that this movie was very violent. I knew because the classification or rating said so. It is rated R by the MPAA and MA15+ in Australia.

Blood Diamond turned out to be much more gruesome than I expected. There are endless scenes of killing and bloodshed, including limbs being chopped off children, bodies sprawled all over the road, mutilated corpses hanging from trees, and so on. Some of the scenes were excruciating, and I'm very sure my mom was not happy with what she saw. In spite of this violence, Mom watched the entire movie and she seemed quite moved by the ending. It's often very difficult for any movie to sustain my mother's interest for so long. Usually she'd get tired and walk away.

Blood Diamond also made me curious about real-life blood diamonds. Even if the specific plot is not real, the background, that is, the Sierra Leone Civil War, and the role of diamonds in funding the conflict, is all real. The rebels in Sierra Leone also made use of child soldiers. This conflict in Sierra Leone reminds me of the conflict today in Darfur and the Congo. However, in Darfur, the conflict is not over diamonds but over oil. The De Beers Corporation claims that, with the establishment of the UN's Kimberley Process, blood diamonds are a thing of the past. Even if there are assurances from certification processes, I am still wary about diamonds and to be on the safe side I myself vow never to buy diamonds ever. One reason for this vow is because I fear I may fund murder and rape. Another reason is because I believe that it's silly to buy for a woman an expensive and useless stone.

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