Fake Blood

To: Leo DiCaprio
From: Recharger The Dog
Re: Blood Diamond.

Dear Leo:

Saw your film, “Blood Diamond.” You recall that after The Aviator, we said you looked like a 12-year-old with a fake mustache, and that your naked scene in the room with the milk bottles was as believable as Ronald Reagan without legs. We take it back. A little. “Blood Diamond” isn’t more realistic, but the story is more important—how illegal diamonds, with the complicity of diamond syndicate DeBeers, helped Sierra Leone warlords fund their bloody revolution, massacre tens of thousands, displace a total of 2 million people, while forcing children into military service. Unlike Scorcese’s pathetic attempt to glorify a nutty billionaire racist, this film at least strives for gravitas. You try too, Leo, but your earnest Rhodesian accent gets screechy, and your attempt to act the racist towards Solomon Vandy, the fishermen forced by marauding rebels to search for diamonds, and your attempt to act turned-on by Maddy (Jennifer Connelly), the equally-screechy, laughably unbelievable American journalist, doesn’t quite convince the way, say, Al Pacino does in Glengarry GlenRoss.

I don’t know what the Zimbabweans make of your accent, but it struck me as Meryl Streepian. At first, I’m like, Wow, that sounds real; then I’m like, this guy sweats so much over the accent, he forgets to act. Worse, just when I’m thinking the movie has enough politics and mercenary intrigue to let me forgive its faults, it sinks into a tub of Hollywood sugar. Solomon not only gets his son back and escapes in a private plane to tell the world what he knows about blood diamonds, but you, mortally wounded, become suddenly GOOD, give Solomon his diamond, and, during a violin-soaked exitus, hold off 200 bad guys with a single rifle.

Reminds me of another movie—let’s see, starts with a T and co-stars Kate Winslet…never mind.

Sincerely,
Recharger

P.S. Hate to be all left-wing and shit, but the bad black guy–the Charles Taylor-like warlord called Captain Poison (David Harewood), is about 100 times more evil than you. I realize your white boss (Arnold Vosloo) is no saint either, but he is urbanely tolerable. Captain Poison oozes despicability. His villainy is out of the worst Marvel Comics. He even has an eyepatch. While you, Leo, are tanned and toned and get to explain your villainy (dad decapitated, mom raped and killed); Captain Poison is dark black and dirty and has no motivation other than greed.

Now why’s that, Leo? Could be he’s black and you’re, um, white?