Jennifer Connelly Movie:

		List Price: $28.99		Label: Warner Home Video Salesrank: 1909 Released: June 5, 2007
		Our Price: $10.00
		Used Price: $10.82
		MPAA Rating: R (Restricted) Media: Blu-ray

Editorial Review:
Warner Brothers Blood Diamond (Blu-ray)
An ex-mercenary turnedsmuggler (Leonard DiCaprio). A Mende fisherman (Djimon Hounsou). Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshedacross the alternately beautiful and ravaged countryside. Directed by Edward Zwick ("Glory," "The Last Samurai"), this urgent, intensely moving adventure shapes gripping human stories and heart-pounding action into a modern epic of profound impact.

Description of Blood Diamond [Blu-ray]:
Leonardo DiCaprio puts a handsome face on an ugly industry: In parts of Africa, diamond mining fuels civil warfare, killing thousands of innocents and drafting preteen children as vicious soldiers. DiCaprio (The Departed) plays Danny Archer, a white African soldier-turned-diamond-smuggler who gets wind of a large raw jewel found by Solomon Vandy, a native fisherman (Djimon Hounsou, In America) recently escaped from enslavement by a brutal rebel leader. Archer offers a deal: He'll help Vandy find his war-scattered family if Vandy will share the diamond with him. Drawn into this web of exploitation is journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly, Little Children), who agrees to help if Archer will tell her the details of how conflict diamonds make their way into the hands of the corporations who sell them to the Western world. DiCaprio is compelling because he never flinches from Archer's utter ruthlessness; Archer ends up doing the morally justifiable thing, but only because his desperate greed has led him to it. Hounsou and Connelly, though saddled with all the moral and political speeches, rise above the cant and keep the movie's treacherously formulaic plot rooted in human characters. But in the end, the story won't stick with you as much as the dead stillness in the child soldiers' eyes; the horror of African civil strife refuses to be contained by Blood Diamond's uplifting message--and the movie is all the more potent as a result. --Bret Fetzer

Blood Diamond [Blu-ray] Reviews:
Movie: 4.75/5 Picture Quality: 2.75~4.25/5 Sound Quality: 4.75/5 Extras: 3.75/5
2008-08-26 - Version: U.S.A / Region Free
VC-1 BD-50
Running time: 2:23:21
Movie size: 22,440,222,720 bytes
Disc size: 30,563,539,040 bytes
Average Video Bit Rate: 12.71 Mbps
LPCM 5.1 4608Kbps 16-bit English
DD AC3 5.1 640Kbps English / French-Quebec / Spanish
Subtitles: English SDH / English / French / Spanish

* Audio Commentary
* Documentary
* Featurettes
* Music Video
* Theatrical Trailer
* Video Diary Vignettes

American, who loves this movie
2008-08-06 - Others have stated it, great movie. Is there some America bashing, maybe a little. But what all these people reviewing harp on is a scene in a bar with Danny and Maddy first meeting. She kind of attacks him for his role in this and he comes back at her with an analogy of how they are in the same business, only she is American so he tells it in relation to her nationality. Thats pretty much it and that when they first meet a TV is on with the whole Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky fiasco going on.

Now, is that America bashing? Its all in context to what is going on in the story. Especially the Clinton part. Thats pretty much there to show 2 things:

1) When this whole RUF, Sierra Leon conflict was going on. Most people know little about it, let alone when it happened. This just puts in our minds when this is going on and most people remember roughly where they were in there lives at that time.
2) It also is there to show the viewers at how certain things get more attention than others. The line was something like this "The world is falling apart and all people care about is BJ's" Now that was coming from an American journalist in Africa reporting on Blood Diamonds, who knows more of what is going on in the world than most people. And she wasn't watching this in America, they were watching this in West Africa, so its not like we Americans were the only ones to focus on that.

That all goes down in about 2 minutes, so I am not sure why everyone takes offense to it. As for the stats they give I don't know if they are accurate, there are diamonds and then there are industrial diamonds, I think they are referring to consumer diamonds. And if you want to more on this do a little research on the subject. You will find it was pretty ugly, the diamond business in general is pretty ugly, and in fact diamonds are really not all that rare. Do some research on DeBeers and see what you find. I watched a documentary on this conflict before seeing this movie, and I thought it was pretty true to the conflict.

Just my thoughts.

Wore Out My Recliner
2008-07-28 - No doubt diamonds have been smuggled out of Africa at a deadly cost. No doubt many African nations have been torn asunder by civil war. No doubt there have been horrendous atrocities. And no doubt preteen boys have been literally snatched from the arms of their parents and turned into ruthless killers. But when a movie, BLOOD DIAMOND, depicts all of the above in such a brutal, graphic nature, the question is begged: Is it really that bad over there. . .or, perhaps, has there been a little embellishment?

But I digress. Whether the quest for a 'Mother Lode' diamond in war-torn Sierra Leone is slightly exaggerated in terms of its gratuitous, mind-numbing violence, the fact remains this movie is pause-everything-else-in-your-life riveting. When a filmmaker has completely and unequivocally drawn in his viewer--makes the viewer forget about everything else other than what he/she is watching on the screen--then cinema magic has been captured in a can. So kudos to the always-innovative Edward Zwick: His astonishing, gasping scenes had me flinching and weaving and jumping so much the springs in my recliner are creaking. By the time the credits were rolling I felt mentally and physically drained--and grandly entertained.

As the lead (a former mercenary turned diamond smuggler with a heart of gold), Leonardo DiCaprio continues to surprise. For the longest time he was an annoying scarecrow; now he's morphing into an accomplished thespian right before our eyes. I really enjoyed his Rhodesian accent (or whatever they're calling Rhodesia these days). And has Djimon Hounsou ever been lousy in a movie? Absolutely not, and his portrayal of a fisherman trying to find and salvage his family is certainly no exception. Jennifer Connelly looks good--even after a couple of nights in the jungle. The on-screen tension between herself and Leo is fun to watch. In fact, BLOOD DIAMOND, even if all the chaos and blood lust is a tad over the top, is fun to watch. And if not fun, riveting works just fine. Five 14-karat gold stars.
--D. Mikels, Author, The Reckoning


DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
2008-07-24 - This film is part-story and part-sermon, and the sermon is better than the story. Some parts are exclusively sermon such as the screen messages at the beginning and the end or the moralistic pontifications of the committee that deliberates on the diamond trade. In terms of length, most of the film consists of the story of a young soldier of fortune turned diamond smuggler, but the basic moral has been enunciated so clearly at the start that nothing in the tale of Danny Solomon and Maddy can be understood as independent of it, and that is all to the good.

Far and away the best things are the horrific sequences of civil war in Sierra Leone, and I have not yet seen a TV documentary on this topic that equals them for sheer impact. The scene where the captives' hands are lopped off spares us the ultimate in realism thank goodness, but nobody is likely to have forgotten it even two hours later when we are told that this barbarity was first introduced into Africa by King Leopold's colonial regime in the Belgian Congo. The sequences featuring the abduction and drilling of the boy revolutionaries have a chilling quality to them that probably comes mainly from a sense that this is how it happened in reality, and I wonder what it was that makes the acting so good in these ghastly vignettes, on the part of the youngsters as well as of the adults. Having encountered nothing that equals this film as a visual reconstruction of the civil war in Sierra Leone my mind reverted to the brief but indelible account of the matter given by Col Tim Collins in his memoir Rules of Engagement. This is of course a factual record, and what sticks in the reader's memory is the surrealistic irrationality of it all, with the insurgents drunk or stoned. In the film the revolutionary commander is at least rational, so for all the power of the enactment it seems that we are again being spared the ultimate worst.

According to the film, the war is about the wealth from diamonds, one rider on the general theorem that wars in Africa are about the ownership of the national resources of each locality. The `blood' theme is symbolised by the pink colour of the giant diamond at the centre of the story, and also by the pale blood of the goat into whose back some smuggled diamonds have been sewn in an early incident, but of course this is only an artistic embellishment to the literal scenes of blood. An action-story is stitched on to the basic backdrop, and in some ways it is a good one. Where the film seems a bit uncertain of itself is to what extent this is a `straight' action yarn and to what extent a parable.

The early episodes featuring Di Caprio and the other principals are not good at all. They are rather old-fashioned 50's-style stuff, very `acted' with stilted one-liners. Di Caprio does his best with encounters in which he sees off a crazed revolutionary and later some border guards with some dreary tough-guy posturing, seemingly able to command any situation by sheer personal presence and interminable repetitions of `huh?' Bogey might have carried it off, but not Di Caprio, and we could at least have done with some memorable phrases, of which I heard none. Things improve gradually, and although the dialogue between Leonardo and Jennifer Connelly is very average it at least makes a bit of a human being, as opposed to a B-movie stiff, out of Danny. The sermon element actually helps, with both of them recounting the grisly experiences of their parents in their respective previous conflicts. The actor who brings the story aspect of the film to life is neither of these but Djimon Hounsou as Solomon, and progressively Di Caprio seems to catch acting off him. In the end I carried away the feeling that Di Caprio represented the story element and Hounsou the `moral' element, the paradox of this being that Hounsou was far more dramatic and convincing. Indeed, in a film whose strength lies basically in its documentary and realistic dimension, the most devastating shot, for me, was of Solomon's bestial roar of rage as he deals out death with his shovel.

The ending is a bit of a tear-jerker, but in fact I did not mind that since the film as a whole is a slightly uneasy mixture of different elements - it might as well end this way as any other way. Danny's fate left my eyes dry, Solomon ends up as the hero and rightly so. It all comes back to the diamond trade and the human beings (for want of a better expression) who operate it. One touch that I welcomed near the end was the brief cameo part for Michael Sheen doing his Tony Blair voice as a diamond dealer, and I wonder which film came first, this one or The Queen. The world of the diamond merchants does not interact much with the hell that their trade creates in Africa. Sierra Leone was at `peace' the last I heard, but we know better by now than to rely on that for long. There are currently storms on the world financial scene, and when those occur the best place to find stability is in, say, gold, or, indeed, diamonds.

WOW! Africa exposed! Finally!
2008-07-16 - Great story, great acting, superb director, unbeatable (for once)historic accuracy! this is the way movies handling conflict zones should be made!
My highest regards and compliments to the director, the producers, the cast and the staff!!