Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Directed by Terry George
Inspired by true events, this film takes place in Rwanda in the 1990s when more than a million Tutsis were killed in a genocide that went mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world. Hotel owner Paul Rusesabagina houses over a thousand refuges in his hotel in attempt to save their lives.
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What critics compared Hotel Rwanda to
Meanwhile, DiCaprio's South African fortune hunter Archer meets his match in humanitarian reporter Maddy (Connelly); it's the kind of dead weight from which flaccid romantic misadventures are made and reminds, if anything, of Joaquin Phoenix's cameo in Hotel Rwanda as a ventriloquist dummy for the filmmaker's belated activism.
Blood Diamond brings to mind the simplified treatment of worldly tragedies in the same line as Hotel Rwanda, but whereas the latter was merely watered down and overly polished, the former is outright clueless in both content and execution.
Zwick appears to want to make another Hotel Rwanda (2004) -- or at least something along the lines of Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (2005) -- when, in fact, his story is more like a politically conscious King Solomon's Mines with doses of Hemingway thrown in.
It is possible to build affecting, responsible dramas around horrific real-life events, as Terry George and Michael Winterbottom have with, respectively, "Hotel Rwanda" and "Welcome to Sarajevo."
Thoughts of 2004’s Hotel Rwanda zipped through my head as I watched Blood Diamond.
In the process, the movie rubs our faces in violence, actually outdoing such recent films as "Beyond Borders," "Hotel Rwanda," "The Constant Gardener" and "The Last King of Scotland" in portraying Africa as a scary, apocalyptic hell on earth.
For all his delicate mannerisms—he addresses strangers as “chaps” and “darlings”—Gustave possesses an underlying strength and dignity that suggest a farcical variation on Don Cheadle’s performance as Paul Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda.
Even when the stories are more thoughtful about race than “Green Book,” in the films that are rapturously lauded with black protagonists in this century (“Selma”, “Ray,” “Hotel Rwanda” even this year’s “Blackkklansman”) we notice at the centre a black man who is not a (mere) common man of the people but a man who stands apart from his peers.
I struggle to think of any major film—Schindler’s List, perhaps, or Hotel Rwanda—that has dealt so pitilessly with a horror so vast.
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If you’re starting out with the premise that I need to know something only you can inform me, you’ve already lost me (and if you think about it, the good ones like Schindler’s List or Hotel Rwanda find a way around that anyway).