The Rare African Eastern Wood Pewee
There are worlds of criticism a person can write about Hollywood, right? Portrayals and stereotypes and Pauly Shore. The list goes on.
Add one more: Blood Diamond's background bird calls are egregiously bad. In a fairly good movie (with some banal dialogue here and there), the bird calls in the background are so wretchedly chosen as to be as jarring as that scene in Bang The Drum Slowly when the boom mike boings all over the top of the frame.
Throughout, they dub in a black-throated green warbler, which lives in eastern America (and which happens to sing my favorite bird call, so it stood out). Now, I heard it a few times, and I thought what an arrogant you-know-what I am, to be thinking I know better than people making a movie. What are the chances, right? There's probably a black-throated-green soundalike in Sierra Leone, I figured, some sort of ill-tempered parrot that decided to mimic the little warbler.
That was when I heard the Eastern Wood Pewee.
For those of you who think me pedantic? It's like calling a Corvette a T-Bird. (My son is 6; we crossed in front of a T-Bird yesterday and he said, "Look! Dad! A T-bird! HOW COOL IS THAT?") It's like pointing to a gyrating Little Richard and saying, "Look at Elvis go!" It is very, very wrong to play American bird calls in the soundtrack of an African movie.
OK, sorry. Back to your regularly scheduled clicking.
