Hutu Rwanda - Revisited/Say my gripes...

In the shadow of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness I must add my comments that Hotel Rwanda may be a poor example of how far Hollywood has gone. Though worthy of praise for its performances and political message, this movie is also strained by the same problems as The Inn... (Hotel? Inn? do you think there's a conspiracy?) In any event, it has a small echo of things not being exactly factual. Though I'm not at all aware of anything not being factual in the story, there are a particular set of coincidences at the ending of the movie that smacks of pure Hollywood. In fact, one particular, that defies explanation within the scope of the movie (perhaps something happened off screen?). This Hollywood ending had me wondering if there were other Hollywood elements buried in the story... That said, I believe it also is handicapped by the same language problem as Inn of the Sixth Happiness (there is something very wonderful about that title... to know that there are six happinesses...). Rwanda, as the audience is reminded, was a belgian colony after all, so if the language isn't native, it would probably, most likely, be french, n'est-ce pas? Nevertheless, nary un mot francais est dit (a french word is spoken...), not even when he calls Belgium. Rather, Paul (Don Cheadle), and the rest of the crew, pretty much spoke the king's english, like they just stepped off a plane from Nairobi.

On the subject of foreign language in movies, I should say the best I ever saw was in Z. This was a greek movie that I think won best foreign language film sometime in the 70's. In any event, when I saw this movie I remember they would typically start scenes by having the actors speaking greek, and displaying subtitles, but then after 20 seconds or so, the voices changed from greek to english. The voices always sounded essentially the same, but the switch would typically take place when one person stopped speaking and another began. The english was dubbed though... Gave you the feel for the language, but also freed you from having to read subtitles for 2 hours...