Hotel Rwanda

It's been called an African Schindler's List, and despite being eager to see such a highly-regarded film, I've owned this one for more than two years and still it remained unseen until tonight. Tonight, finally, I decided to man up and deal with watching a depressing movie. It's finals week, after all, and what could be more depressing than that? Well, this. What an excellent movie. Now, I've seen both Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland recently, and neither movie was capable of truly moving me. They were sad, yes, and both certainly left me thinking, "it is fucked up that this genocide shit still goes on in Africa in this day and age," but neither movie made me feel the terror, hopelessness, and urgency that should be associated with a plight such as genocide. This film did. Don Cheadle was absolutely amazing here, and so was the character he played. Like Schindler did for the Jews, Paul (Cheadle) takes in a bunch of refugees who would face certain execution were it not for his protection, and he sacrifices his entire business and fortune in the process. Now, I keep bringing up Schindler's List; a fair question is, how does Hotel Rwanda compare to that classic? I'll be honest: it doesn't. Schindler's List was longer, more epic in scope, more graphic and gruesome, and - I'm just gonna come out and say this - was about the genocide of Western people by other Western people. It's a sad fact, but it's still a fact: we Westerners just don't care about the shit that goes on in the third world. It's not necessarily a racial issue - we tend not to give a shit about the whites in Eastern Europe, for example. It's more of a wealth issue, I think. We rich nations only care about each other. Let's be honest - we're hit way harder as a nation by a few hundred people dying in a regional plane crash than we are by thousands of people in China getting buried by an earthquake. Again, it's not racial - consider the Hurricane Katrina plight in which we watched with bated breath as tens of thousands of people (mostly black ones) survived while waiting too long (a few days) for help to arrive. Now, how many non-American blacks are there in Africa getting slaughtered, dying of AIDS, or simply starving to death. Help typically doesn't arrive for them, and when it does, it takes a lot more than a few days. We're not racists; we're elitists. Not sure if that's necessarily better, but, well, it's true. Even this movie had the balls to come right out and say it. In one of the most startlingly accurate and direct quotes I've ever heard in a movie that was based on a contemporary true story, one UN worker tells Paul, "No one is coming to save you. You're black. And you're not even niggers. You're Africans." Bone-chillingly true, that statement right there. But facts are facts: we glorify the agony of the Holocaust to such an extreme degree, but hardly care to be bothered by the shit happening at this exact moment in the Congo, Sudan, and sub-Saharan Africa in general. But not because we're racist. We just have a heavy Western World bias. And don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to take anything away from the Holocaust. That genocide sucked too. Big time. I'm just saying that Hotel Rwanda will never be the classic that Schindler's List was because we feel less horrible about African people killing African people today than we still do about European people killing European people sixty years ago. It is what it is. Regardless, Hotel Rwanda is still a fantastic film and it certainly makes my list of "best films of the decade." You know, once I get around to making that list.