{"id":10000,"date":"2016-06-08T11:39:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T11:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=10000"},"modified":"2016-06-08T11:39:34","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T11:39:34","slug":"lord-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2016\/06\/08\/lord-of-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord of War [2005]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>WIP<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Lord of War is one of my favorite movies. It&#8217;s not like I watched it once and thought &#8220;Oh my god this is the best movie ever&#8221;\u2013 it just sort of grew on me over time.<\/p>\n<p>The opening scene is really powerful, and might easily be my favorite opening sequence of all time. It shows the journey of a bullet, from manufacture to the brain of a child soldier. (If you haven&#8217;t watched the movie, watch the opening sequence, and then watch the movie before reading the rest of this review.)<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"770\" height=\"434\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zNMMRb9ik1g?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Spoilers ahead.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>The closing scene is equally powerful if not more so.<\/p>\n<p>There are lots of interesting stories. A man from a difficult place, and his brother. Corruption in governments and militaries. The human predisposition to violence. Lies and deceit.<\/p>\n<p>It also asks some very interesting, and painfully practical, questions about where responsibility begins and ends. Nicholas Cage&#8217;s character, Yuri, thinks of himself as just a supplier, a cog in a massive machine that he isn&#8217;t personally responsible for. His brother (Jared Leto) has a change of heart, and dies because of it. The man who&#8217;s pursuing him<\/p>\n<p>At one point, an African warlord&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Depiction of African warlords with gold-plated AK-47s.<\/p>\n<p>The protagonist starts out poor, wanting to get rich. He gets very, very rich, but he loses everything in the process \u2013 his family, his &#8216;innocence&#8217;, his integrity, everything. And ultimately he gets addicted to arms dealing, because he&#8217;s so good at it.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently AK-47s are so cheap, it&#8217;s cheaper to buy an actual AK-47 than a prop\u2013 and so the movie used real AK-47s.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>WIP Lord of War is one of my favorite movies. It&#8217;s not like I watched it once and thought &#8220;Oh my god this is the best movie ever&#8221;\u2013 it just sort of grew on me over time. The opening scene is really powerful, and might easily be my favorite opening&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[827],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lord-of-war-gold-movie.jpg?fit=640%2C360&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-2Bi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}