Hi, my name is Sarah G. Vincent, and I watch crappy movies so you don’t have to. I love Angelina Jolie. I love that she uses her super powers (her beauty, her raw sexuality, her gobs of cash) for good. Hollywood has no idea what to do with her unbridled sexuality and danger-she isn’t safe. I can objectively say that she is more successful than me, and I think that is great. She should be because I‘m naturally more conventional, but I’m beginning to think that I want more for her than she wants for herself. I have yet to see Maleficent, but am saddened to hear that my imagination of her take on a Disney movie was darker than the actual product. She seems torn: a good girl in bad sheep clothing? Who says that bad girls aren’t good? She has an impulse towards the darker side of nature, glances at it then rushes headlong towards convention, misses the mark and leaves neither side satisfied in In the Land of Blood and Honey. I initially didn’t want to watch the movie because who really wants to see a movie that was basically promoted as the war rape film. Jolie got a lot of praise for even wanting to address the subject matter of a foreign conflict with human rights abuses directed aggressively against women in her directorial debut. Well, I’m not going to do that because she didn’t do that. I expect more from her, and I know that she has it in her to look at horror, break convention and create her own path, but instead war rape is simply the backdrop for an unconvincing, alleged love story. In the Land of Blood and Honey seems to ask what would have happened between those two crazy kids if the war never happened. Considering that it seemed like they only went on a first date before the war, I’m guessing not much. Oh sure, bad things happen-people suddenly get raped and shot, recount past horrors and placed in concentration camps, but the actual movie doesn’t give voice to the powerless except for brief plaintive pleas from victims reminding their captors that they were once neighbors. By the end of the movie, a false equivalency is drawn between the victims and perpetrators as both being guilty of evil acts and suffering from ethnic hatred, which acts as an obstacle to the “couple.” There is even the trope of a domineering father of the 40-year old man in the relationship. This father also happens to be a leading war criminal and the lead soldier’s boss. There does not seem to be a single three-dimensional person in the entire movie. Even when the inevitable conflict between the father and the clandestine couple arises, the resulting horror isn’t even as bad as I could imagine. I’m not saying that I need a parade of atrocities, but if there is an actual parade of atrocities in a conflict that existed in the real world, why not?!? Why make it about something different entirely? What purpose does that serve? Either give me a movie that at least initially convinces me that a couple loved each other before all hell breaks lose and tears them apart with a nod to Jolie’s sadomasochistic tendencies and war as a backdrop OR give me a movie that forces me to look at atrocities that most of the world turned away from when they actually occurred-see Silenced, also known as The Crucible. Choose a master and serve him, but not this lukewarm, bloated crap that only inadvertently reinforces awful ideas about the nature of consent in unequal power dynamics. In the Land of Blood and Honey isn’t a romance, but about a terrified woman who chose a path to try and survive and then rationalized it so she could live with herself until she couldn’t and creates the fiction of a nice captor for the audience to sympathize with. I wonder if The Night Porter inspired Jolie (I barely remember that movie because I haven’t seen it in ages). Now can we tell the story of real women instead of these fictional constructs?