whitefalcon79

The premise for Hotel Rwanda seems much like that of Schindler's List, released a decade before it... the story of one man who uses his power and position to provide a haven for refugees from a brutal war where they are the targets. I'll be blunt; Schindler's List underwhelmed me and I felt like I was being forced to feel emotions that just wouldn't generate themselves.

Hotel Rwanda succeeds where Spielberg's self-proclaimed classic failed. Lead character Paul (Don Cheadle) shelters men, women and children from both sides of Rwanda's bloody civil war. You don't go into this film with any preconceived 'Jews good, Nazis bad' notion of whether it is the Hutu or the Tutsi people who are being demonised. It is the atrocities of the war itself that are painted in a deserving light and the producers let the film focus on Paul's struggle to save the lives of those in his care.

The film is brutally honest about the horrors of war without the melodrama that might bely a lesser production. The images speak for themselves; there is no need for over-blown orchestral melodies in the background trying to forcibly yank the tears from our eyes. It's a straight-up, believable film.

The entire cast nail their parts to perfection, especially Cheadle who comes into his own playing an unlikely hero, sometimes skittish and unsure of himself, only once having to display any kind of bravado, and even then only when it is necessary that his people's lives will be spared.

Hotel Rwanda is a brilliant, moving and most of all realistic film that lets the true story on which it is based tell itself, without having to 'Hollywood it up' and thereby ruin the picture. A must see for all ages.

I will admit I have spent the past ten years or so developing a healthy intolerance for the modern thriller/horror movie. Gone are the days of movies like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (I'm talking about the original here) where we never actually saw Leatherface run the chainsaw through any of his victims... the true horrors were left to our imagination, the scariest place of all. No, it's all been replaced with buckets of fake blood and CGI heads exploding or whatever in the name of "realism".

So it's a pleasure to finally come across a movie that actually has the ability to creep into your mind and tell you something, staying with you after the credits begin rolling, rather than cheating you out of the admission fee by hacking up random bystanders for the sake of gore.

As a movie, Saw covers little or no new ground but it teaches us chilling lessons about ourselves, about life, about other people around us and how what we do with our lives will eventually come back to face us one way or another. You don't get that from your average serial killer movie; not even those that supposedly develop the character of the killer and make you feel like there might be a method behind his madness. The motives of "the Jigsaw killer" are out in plain view; his victims are punished for disrespecting their own lives by being placed in situations where they must endure the worst just to get out. In doing so, they find a new appreciation for the life that they have... at least, that's the idea.

The greatest thing about Saw is the way the story all comes together at the end. Of course, I'm not going to spoil it by revealing any details but even if you, like I did, find the first half of the movie laborious and the acting by most of the cast teetering on B-movie quality, there are no plot holes left and nothing but a very real sense of knowing exactly why it all happened the way it did.

Saw is not mind-blowingly brilliant, but it goes in a very different direction to every other piece of trash Hollywood has turned out lately with the tag "thriller" or "horror"... and for that reason alone, I found it worth the skepticism I swallowed when I finally decided to rent the DVD after purposely missing the cinematic release.

Watch this movie expecting to be thinking about it - and yourself - long after it's over.