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Sex, Violence, and the American Way: This Film Is Not Yet Rated

I don’t know why it is that you don’t see the rating for a film onscreen until the end of the movie, as the very last thing on the end credits before the house lights come up, the canned music resumes and the high schoolers start sweeping up the popcorn and candy boxes those slobs in back of you couldn’t be bothered to take to the trash can. Wouldn’t you think that a better place would be at the beginning of the movie, just to give you one last chance to drag the wee ones away before their eyes are accidentally exposed to the acid burn of an R-rated film?



He's a Rhinestone in the Rough: Blood Diamond

Every so often, Blood Diamond seems on the verge of becoming really serious about its ostensible politico-moral theme. Edward Zwick’s big, blood-and-thunder movie is set in 1999 in Sierra Leone, amidst a brutally destructive civil war in which the insurgents financed their ragtail armed forces and campaigns through the illicit sale of diamonds. For about a decade, the rebels mined the diamonds with forced labor and smuggled them out to Europe for sale in the developed world, aided by hypocritically complicit executives in European and North American companies.





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