It's all fun and games until civil war rips your country apart and millions die fighting needlessly

[andrewducker]

So, last week I went to see Blood Diamond (very good, albeit harrowing, story of African poverty, power struggles, etc. with excellent performances all round) and then to see Last King of Scotland (very good, albeit harrowing, story of African poverty, power struggles, etc. with excellent performances all round).

I went to Blood Diamond with posonduk who got me in for free due to her being El Presidente of the movie club and when we got out we were already feeling pretty traumatised - the sheer grimness of the diamond mining operations, where hundreds of villagers were enslaved so that a few rebel leaders could earn money to buy more weapons was bad enough, but the images of refugee camps and slums were in some ways even worse. The film did a very good job of portraying mankinds casual indifference to the suffering of others, and the way that poverty would force almost anyone into terrible acts if they thought they could get themselves out of the gutters. It also has some of the best-filmed war sequences I've seen since Saving Private Ryan. I can only assume they bought a small African city purely to blow large chunks of it up.

We then staggered over to a different cinema to see Last King of Scotland with purelyskindeep, ripperlyn and tisme, which felt a lot more up close and personal. The acting was also better - which isn't to say that Blood Diamon's acting wasn't great - merely that Forrest Whittaker _is_ Idi Amin. Rather than an overview of terrible injustices performed over a whole country, Last King of Scotland focusses entirely on the personal experiences of James McAvoy's character (thinking back on it, I can think of only one scene that he isn't actually in), and while we get a flavour of the horrors being carried out around the country by Amin's men, it's shown to us through individual incidents rather than wide-screen presentation of the scale of the suffering. The cinematography worked well, but wasn't as good as Blood Diamond's, (I may be slightly biased here by my allergy to handycam-style swinging shots, having spent large chunks of the second half of the film trying not to throw up from motion sickness).

Overall a 8.5 for Blood Diamond (half a point knocked off for occasional over-preachiness) and a 9 for Last King of Scotland. Neither is the kind of film I'll be rushing to see again in the near future, but they've both left me with powerful imagery ingrained in my mind, definitely the mark of good cinema.

Comments

[neferet.livejournal.com]

I also suffer motion sickness with that type of filming :( Was going to go with your/Erin's recommendation to see it, but think will wait now til its rental release, so I can actually watch it :)

[cybik.livejournal.com]

I really want to see The Last King of Scotland. I'æve heard several people praise it, even though it'll probably not be enjoyable as such..

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Have you seen Barbet Schroeder's General Idi Amin Dada, a documentary he made with the co-operation of Admin in the early 1970s. It might make for an interesting companion piece to Last King of Scotland.

[andrewducker]

Haven't seen it - but I find this comment amusing:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0071544/#comment