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Lord of War

Date: Sep 21 2005

Intro

1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.

2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.

Nicholas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, an Ukrainian-American who starts out as a small-time gun peddler in Brighton Beach, New York. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which leaves enormous stockpiles of military equipment available for sale on the black market, Yuri emerges as a fat cat international weapons dealer, supplying guns and ammunition to some of the world’s most brutal regimes.
Here, John and Dave talk about the movie.

Dialog

1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.

2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.

John

Dave

John: See any good movies lately, Dave?

Dave: What’d I see last? I saw Lord of War last week, with Nicholas Cage.

John: Oh, I haven’t heard of that. Is it good?

Dave: Yeah, it’s really good. It’s not like the typical thriller, like shoot ‘em up, kill people. It’s more…it’s kind of political focus on…on the international arms trade.

John: Does he do a good job, Nicholas Cage?

Dave: Yeah. He always does a good job. I’m a big fan of his.

John: He’s a really good actor.

Dave: Yeah, so. And this movie’s pretty good: it draws attention to, you know, the big global arms dealers, points out that, you know, the five members of the U.N. Security Council are the biggest arms dealers in the world.

John: Yeah, you never hear about that stuff in the news.

Dave: No, you don’t.

John: But it’s real.

Dave: It’s real. And it’s like, you know, these countries, these people, are flooding the world with weapons.

John: Ah, I’ll have to check that out.

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Discussion

For people who don’t know much about the global arms trade, Lord of War is an eye-opener. The opening sequence follows a bullet from its creation in a manufacturing plant to its end-purpose as a tool of death. The film highlights loopholes in international law that allow private arms dealers to operate, and wraps up with a well-known but ominous fact: The United States, Russia, U.K., China and France – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council – are the world’s largest arms dealers, and private weapons-runners like Yuri Orlov are small potatoes.