Tear Filled Double Feature (from 2 weeks ago...)

Hotel Rwanda was first up on the docket. There’s nothing like a tragedy of the human spirit to lift me out of my lull. All joking aside, I hate seeing movies that expose me for being a stupid American. I’m sitting there while this movie is revisiting 1994 in Rwanda when over 1 millions lives were lost to genocide and I’m thinking, “why didn’t I know about this?” I had a similar feeling when I saw Black Hawk Down, which explores another African situation that I knew nothing about over in Somalia. Unlike BHD, Hotel Rwanda is from the perspective of the victims and the heroic actions of one man played by Don Cheadle. The true story shows how a hotel manager of a 4 star hotel in Rwanda turns the hotel into a refugee camp during a battle of rebels vs. military over ethnicity. The movie does an good job of showing the evils of genocide and the inability of the world to intervene when such atrocities take place. The performances of Nick Nolte and Joaquin Phoenix were low key but poignant. However, this movie is all about one man and that man is Don Cheadle. In a year of breakout performances by actors, see Paul Giamatti or Jamie Foxx, Don gets his shot with this movie and hits it out of the park.

Speaking of Best Actor nominations, I know understand why Clint Eastwood bumped Paul Giamatti from contention this year. I would argue that Leo probably doesn’t deserve to be on the ballot, but I haven’t seen Aviator to fully comment. Million Dollar Baby was my follow up feature, and lest I spoil it for you, I will merely say that this movie may appear to be about boxing, but it isn’t. Clint Eastwood gives his best performance in the past decade and has a great cast in Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank. This movie plays a lot like Mystic River, in that it’s long and very depressing with stellar performances. I’m very happy to see Hilary Swank back in top form. I’ve always been oddly attracted to her and think that she is an extremely talented actress. You get sick of seeing the same pretty girls like Renee and Nicole always up for awards. Hilary is doing it for the regular looking ladies out there. In this movie she plays the trashiest white girl from the trailer park and is completely convincing. And she has boxing skills to boot. The boxing scenes are very formulaic, but like I said the boxing is merely a backdrop. The movie is about relationships and life and death.