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Reviews
Blood Diamond (2006)
Nothing memorable and visually uninteresting
This film makes me doubt a lot about this kind of docudrama (which seems to be «en vogue» at Hollywood), I mean about its reason to be done. The acting was completely unconvincing and the script predictable. Just to point a precise moment, the speech of Solomon Vandy to his son in the gun-threat scene was almost ridiculous and it could be great. Also Danny Archer was far from being the «tough guy» deeply troubled by his dark childhood in Africa (I appreciated the irony of stop smoking in the last minutes of the film / before his death: «smoking is dangerous only if you are alive», he used to say). It's a pity that instead of get me worried about what is happening in Africa, the film only get me bored. I would prefer to see instead a straight documentary on National Geographic and it would be memorable.
Bled Number One (2006)
A story about Algeria, about the schizoid life with strong traditions placed in the horizon of the largely spread emigration in France.
Even if the cinema is discovered more than a century ago, the director of this film shots today in a, so to say, genuine style (we could say à la Lumière), that is disregarding any authorial input, getting rid of any drama rules, collapsing the dialogs and then just standing discreetly in front of (apparently) «nothing happens». A very acute authenticity rises then, in this non-interventionist way of filming which provide some beautiful portraits (in gros-plan) and a collection of «bricks» of pure (inner) time. The movie is supposed to be charming and original in giving us all freedom to see these bricks together in a virtual composition. But this is a little bit too virtual even if I appreciate this particular way of being «cool» by letting the story to tell (or to lose) itself. A story about Algeria, about the schizoid life with strong traditions placed in the horizon of the largely spread emigration in France. The film let us ask ourselves if the ingenuousness has been really lost in cinema.