The small African nation of Sierra Leone is situated next to Liberia, and while Liberia produces billions of dollars of diamonds annually, Sierra Leone produces virtually none. The reason for this, at least according to this movie, is that the diamonds within Sierra Leone are taken by rebel forces and then sold to fund their rebellion.
In the process, countless families are broken up, with the lucky ones killed off immediately, but many others left maimed, physically or emotionally (or in many cases both). The healthy men are used for mining these diamonds, while the youth can be taken to replenish the forces that are killed in the process of doing so. It’s not a pretty sight.
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Posted to
Thriller on July 9th, 2006 by Chad Everett
Back when Drew Barrymore was trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, she made this movie about being a bad girl – only she wasn’t that bad. She did it mostly with mental games, and though there is a certain sexual overtone to the movie, there’s actually very little sex in it. Perhaps that means she was over her bad girl phase, since she hit at such a young age.
Or perhaps she was just in need of a paycheck, so she took the opportunity to jump at whatever came along. After all, this was probably the best of all the Poison Ivy movies that were made, so it’s certainly good that she picked the first, rather than one of the others, but you can’t really give her credit for thinking ahead, when there was no guarantee that they would have ever made another one, so who knows?
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Posted to
Drama on June 23rd, 2006 by Chad Everett
While I suspect that this movie is a bit of a fabrication because it says it was “inspired by a true story”, which has to be a step below “based on a true story”, there was some truth in there somewhere. We do know that Frank William Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) was a con man who, before his 19th birthday, wrote millions of dollars of fraudulent checks and passed himself off as a pilot, doctor and lawyer.
FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), meanwhile, is his foil, who tracks him across the country and finally around the world to bring him down. Time after time they cross paths as Abagnale goes through identities and his checks get better and better. We’re watching a movie, but it’s probably somewhat accurate in that the first batch of checks he passes are little more than paper with some decals on them.
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