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Wholly satisfying. "It's what's inside that counts," indeed! Not an earth-shattering or particularly complex work, but very strong and beautifully executed.



At last Don Cheadle gets a leading role! This film tore me up. Cha could barely tolerate it and cried for two hours straight during the movie; after she was miserable for hours. I've for a long time lamented the easy tear-jerker quality of the genocide drama--Hotel Rwanda of course falls squarely into this category (a movie whose subject matter is so awful that of course the audience will have powerful emotional reactions, regardless of the quality of the actual work--I note Life is Beautiful as the worst of this sort of film, with other over-rated fare like The Killing Fields and the wooden Schindler's List on the list). What's different here is largely Cheadle's magnificence. Early in the film Paul Rusesabagina thinks all the racial tension will just go away, or that the UN or the Americans or the French will stop it. When the Hutus start "cutting the tall trees," however, Paul's desperate attempts to continue his work, to keep his part of the world an oasis in a desert of inhuman butchery, add a bizarre Kafkaesque edge to this dreadful tale, and Cheadle plays this role with remarkable range and openness. When Cheadle as Rusesabagina talks about shame, when Nolte as the UN colonel on the ground tells him the West is indifferent to blacks in Africa, there's an uncomfortable guilt--and director Terry George knows how to use this audience reaction, combining it deftly with the ironic tension that we know what the characters don't yet know is about to happen, further ratcheting up the exquisite sense of hopelessness as beautiful people in a beautiful landscape decide to turn their country into an abbatoir. We see the UN arrive with much celebration, only to save the foreigners, leaving desperate Tutsis to fend for themselves--Gross allows the camera to linger over the whites as they sit on their secure bus preparing to evacuate, pets mysteriously worthy of rescue in their laps, as they take pictures of their African "friends" now assured of destruction. I think this is a magnificent film. Nolte's Colonel reminded me of Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, whose story is frankly one of the most aggravating I've encountered:



On a lighter note, I bought



and have done nothing but hoe-down all weekend.