Hotel Rwanda
This movie ought to be subtitled “Some Really Serious Shit.”
Hotel Rwanda definitely confirmed my suspicious that Don Cheadle is completely awesome. I haven’t seen Ray, but if I were Don, I would be pretty miffed that Jamie Foxx’s impression of Ray Charles beat me out for the most deserved Oscar in a long fucking time.
Basically, this is the story of Paul Rusesabagina (yeah, I definitely looked up how to spell that), a Rwandan hotel manager who saved like, a couple thousand people during the Hutu on Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in the early 90s. With little help from the UN (represented by Nick Nolte. No, seriously, he was actually pretty good) Paul begins to harbor refugees from the really seriously totally brutal fighting in his hotel.
All the performances here were really solid. I was somehow distracted by Sophie Okonedo who plays Paul’s wife because she kind of only had one face: really concerned. But then I thought, well, she probably is pretty concerned, I mean, what with her ‘race’ being the target of a brutal genocide. Also, they seem to take a quite a few beer/wine/whiskey breaks. Again, probably to be expected.
At times – mostly the very beginning and the very end – the movie did suffer the terrible fate of ultra-obvious over-scoring. Like, really, it was pretty serious already, I don’t need the cellos to swell for me to get the point.
But overall, a totally depressing, really good ‘make-you-think’ kind of movie. I’m going to go find out what Don Cheadle is up to.
[...] bored and annoyed with the sexy-playboy-moron-doctor kid who ended up being the protagonist. Where Hotel Rwandawas “some really serious shit” this was “some really serious shit that isn’t [...]