Netflix Movie Review #1
Oct. 26th, 2005 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
borlandiaSo I subscribed to Netflix, so I'm going to start doing movie reviews for the movies I get. If you have seen it, you can post comments and tell me what you thought, and if you haven't, well, I'm nothing special so maybe it'll mean nothing to you.
This movie was, in a word, terrific. I hadn't heard much about this movie before getting it other than many people I knew had seen it and said it was very touching and very sad. Perhaps going into it I had desensitized myself to the fact that it was going to be sad (and I knew it was a movie about genocide against a certain racial class) so I wasn't all that shocked to see the sequences of people getting beat and occasionally murdered. What did surprise me was that it was originally rated R (which it may should have been) but it was appealed and made PG-13.
The acting was the thing that really stood out. Don Cheadle (who you might know from "Boogie Nights" "Bulworth" or "Ocean's Eleven") played the main character, Paul, a hotel manager who turns his hotel into a refugee camp for those trying not to be slaughtered by the militia camp. The movie mostly centers around the troubles they have keeping away from being killed and the politics surrounding the situation. Joaquin Phoenix was also in this movie, albeit with a small role as a photographer and delivers one of the more chilling lines after showing his tape of the Tutsi people being hacked with machetes, "People in America are going to look at this, say 'that's horrible' and then go back to eating their dinners. They're not sending help". The other one comes from Nick Nolte, who plays a UN military captain who says, "They don't care about you. You could own this place, but you can't. Because you're black. Hell, you're not even a nigger. You're African." The third part comes at the very end where they wrap up everything and inform you in text that the genocide ended in 1994, with almost a million corpses scattered about Rwanda. Overall, they made pretty much all the characters likable and really didn't make you "pick a side" in the ongoing war between the two nationalities. They both had their good and bad sides, and they kept the political aspect out of it, and kind of kept the plot at plot level and the only real social comment was that human kindness can rise above nationalities and politics. Perhaps there was another thing to be said when buses arrived to save the refugees, but they would only take whites, and as the buses sped off Joaquin Phoenix's character fighting back tears says "I'm so ashamed." The ending was a happy ending as well. It wasn't 100% depressing.
The cinematography was very good as well, there are a couple scenes scanning the acres of dead bodies after Paul sees through a clear fog where he is. The only real bad part of this movie was how fast it moved. Plot would go really really fast and a lot of times you couldn't really understand what was going on. Plus, there was a lot of African dialect in it that you couldn't quite understand and it was difficult to tell who was of what nationality, and keep along with it. The other thing was the character of Paul's son, who is consistently ill or mentally traumatized or something, and they don't focus at all on him and explain why he's so fucked up compared to the other kids, or show the parents' attempts at comforting him. Early in the movie, he's missing and they find him shivering in a bush covered in blood. In a panic they clean the blood off him looking for wounds only to find the blood isn't his. They never explain whose it was or why it was there. Also the "happy ending" shows the reunification of Paul and his wife with their nieces. Overall, there wasn't a whole lot devoted in this movie to the concern over these nieces, only about a minute total, really. So that kinda confused me because it seemed like the emotion at the end was forced, and the scene wasn't really needed, and it could've ended with them on the bus headed away from Rwanda. It of course, finishes nicely with Paul telling the Red Cross worker "There's always room".
The story, however, is amazing, and powerful. There are spots in the movie that really make you think about the message being conveyed, and the performances and script as well as the scenery displayed is enough to carry it well. Overall, entertaining, strongly emotional, and also a good lesson in contemporary world political structure surrounding the times with the struggling African nations. Even today, Sudan is a huge mess.
KB Rating:
(out of 5)
This movie was, in a word, terrific. I hadn't heard much about this movie before getting it other than many people I knew had seen it and said it was very touching and very sad. Perhaps going into it I had desensitized myself to the fact that it was going to be sad (and I knew it was a movie about genocide against a certain racial class) so I wasn't all that shocked to see the sequences of people getting beat and occasionally murdered. What did surprise me was that it was originally rated R (which it may should have been) but it was appealed and made PG-13.
The acting was the thing that really stood out. Don Cheadle (who you might know from "Boogie Nights" "Bulworth" or "Ocean's Eleven") played the main character, Paul, a hotel manager who turns his hotel into a refugee camp for those trying not to be slaughtered by the militia camp. The movie mostly centers around the troubles they have keeping away from being killed and the politics surrounding the situation. Joaquin Phoenix was also in this movie, albeit with a small role as a photographer and delivers one of the more chilling lines after showing his tape of the Tutsi people being hacked with machetes, "People in America are going to look at this, say 'that's horrible' and then go back to eating their dinners. They're not sending help". The other one comes from Nick Nolte, who plays a UN military captain who says, "They don't care about you. You could own this place, but you can't. Because you're black. Hell, you're not even a nigger. You're African." The third part comes at the very end where they wrap up everything and inform you in text that the genocide ended in 1994, with almost a million corpses scattered about Rwanda. Overall, they made pretty much all the characters likable and really didn't make you "pick a side" in the ongoing war between the two nationalities. They both had their good and bad sides, and they kept the political aspect out of it, and kind of kept the plot at plot level and the only real social comment was that human kindness can rise above nationalities and politics. Perhaps there was another thing to be said when buses arrived to save the refugees, but they would only take whites, and as the buses sped off Joaquin Phoenix's character fighting back tears says "I'm so ashamed." The ending was a happy ending as well. It wasn't 100% depressing.
The cinematography was very good as well, there are a couple scenes scanning the acres of dead bodies after Paul sees through a clear fog where he is. The only real bad part of this movie was how fast it moved. Plot would go really really fast and a lot of times you couldn't really understand what was going on. Plus, there was a lot of African dialect in it that you couldn't quite understand and it was difficult to tell who was of what nationality, and keep along with it. The other thing was the character of Paul's son, who is consistently ill or mentally traumatized or something, and they don't focus at all on him and explain why he's so fucked up compared to the other kids, or show the parents' attempts at comforting him. Early in the movie, he's missing and they find him shivering in a bush covered in blood. In a panic they clean the blood off him looking for wounds only to find the blood isn't his. They never explain whose it was or why it was there. Also the "happy ending" shows the reunification of Paul and his wife with their nieces. Overall, there wasn't a whole lot devoted in this movie to the concern over these nieces, only about a minute total, really. So that kinda confused me because it seemed like the emotion at the end was forced, and the scene wasn't really needed, and it could've ended with them on the bus headed away from Rwanda. It of course, finishes nicely with Paul telling the Red Cross worker "There's always room".
The story, however, is amazing, and powerful. There are spots in the movie that really make you think about the message being conveyed, and the performances and script as well as the scenery displayed is enough to carry it well. Overall, entertaining, strongly emotional, and also a good lesson in contemporary world political structure surrounding the times with the struggling African nations. Even today, Sudan is a huge mess.
KB Rating:
(out of 5)
