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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Andrew Niccol's "Lord of War" gets under way with the story of a bullet. The camera takes us inside an armaments factory, where, from the cartridge's point of view, we see a brass casing filled, sealed, picked up and inspected, thrown back into a pile, and crated. The box is then turned over to a Russian officer and shipped to African thugs, who take the cartridge out of its crate and give it to a fighter, who fires it into the head of an unsuspecting young boy. This sequence--at first nifty, then horrifying--is composed of many separate shots, but the editor, Zach Staenberg, cut the material in such a way that the bullet's progression feels continuous and inexorable. At the climax, the camera seems to be flying through the air straight at the boy. A malicious wit, this Andrew Niccol: by forcing the audience to take the bullet's flight, he is suggesting that we are complicit both in arms sales (the United States is a leading exporter) and in eager enjoyment of movie violence, of which this sequence is a startling and admonitory example.
"Lord of War," the story of the rise of an international arms dealer, is a raffishly ironic and insinuating movie--and probably the most sheerly enjoyable film of the year so far. Its hero, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), a fluent and plausible-sounding fellow, was born in Ukraine but grew up in Brighton Beach, among Jews who were...
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