If you really want to find out a bit more about the genocide in Rwanda of 1994, this is THE movie to go! It's a wonderful, yet uncompromisingly sad and bitter movie. Whereas "Hotel Rwanda" was more like Schindlers List in Africa, more focusing on a Hollywood-like hero & love story, "Sometimes in April" leads you right into the very depths of hell. The characters are well pointed out, the acting is always impressive and the film-making is very subtle and pleasantly calm. the only thing really which I could complain about to a certain degree was the sometimes a bit too prominently set musical soundtrack. Still - this movie is unforgettable; for one simply because of its honest attempt to tell the story of what happened in Rwanda, when the world literally turned its head - and on the other hand I feel the deepest respect for the team involved in making this for their seriousness and adequacy. A very daring and important movie!
Reviews
4 Reviews
The Believer
(2001)
It's maybe not so much about the obvious ....
15 April 2005
Warning: Spoilers
Well, I don't really know what this movie is trying to bring across. It's not that I'm the "message" type of guy; in fact I would always prefer questions rather than answers. But let's assume this movie's main issue is antisemitism - in which way is it being portrayed? If you ask me, it's a mess. All kind of different antisemitic stereotypes are mixed together so that it sometimes seems more like a panorama which just SHOWS. But the picture it shows is blurry. Not for one second it's made plausible how the main character turned from a sceptic young lad to a hyper violent thug - the only explanation the movie seems to give for this per se uninteresting development is that of what in Christianity would be a theodizee ("if there's a god, why's there so much suffering on earth?"). I have myself seen black neo-Nazis. Well, these guys are funny. It might be of an almost voyeuristic interest to watch them - but their sole existence teaches you nothing about racism, antisemitism or what attracts people to this strange formula of neo-nationalsocialism we find portrayed in movies like American HISTORY X or ROMPER STOMPER or THE BELIEVER. Jewish neo-Nazis are freaks basically. So what?
the end of the movie where we find something like a dream or an after-life sequence (which is, frankly spoken, a bit funny - does this mean the narrator is god then?) in which the presumably dead main character is running upstairs endlessly. Of course, what at first seems to be a metaphor for (here we go again) questioning and searching is in fact a translation of the ancient Greek myth of sysyphos. Now how's that connected to the movie's main issue, antisemitism? I tell you how it is - not at all. It's all purely eclectic and for-the-hell-of-it. If that's what the movie is about, showing the absurdity of religion itself (here we have to place sysyphos then), well - accepted. I'd buy that.
When you get THE BELIEVER on DVD, there's an interview with the director among the special features. This guy seems to have a real problem with jews, really. Did you know know why this movie didn't make it big? He explains it - cause a rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal Center gave it a bad review ... here we go again ..... another dull and ridiculous stereotype. But not articulated in the story telling process but in real life.
the end of the movie where we find something like a dream or an after-life sequence (which is, frankly spoken, a bit funny - does this mean the narrator is god then?) in which the presumably dead main character is running upstairs endlessly. Of course, what at first seems to be a metaphor for (here we go again) questioning and searching is in fact a translation of the ancient Greek myth of sysyphos. Now how's that connected to the movie's main issue, antisemitism? I tell you how it is - not at all. It's all purely eclectic and for-the-hell-of-it. If that's what the movie is about, showing the absurdity of religion itself (here we have to place sysyphos then), well - accepted. I'd buy that.
When you get THE BELIEVER on DVD, there's an interview with the director among the special features. This guy seems to have a real problem with jews, really. Did you know know why this movie didn't make it big? He explains it - cause a rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal Center gave it a bad review ... here we go again ..... another dull and ridiculous stereotype. But not articulated in the story telling process but in real life.
Hotel Rwanda
(2004)
A good movie, yet ....
25 March 2005
To keep it short: What really turned me down was that the makers of this movie or maybe rather the writer of the script didn't have the courage to focus on the events of the genocide in rwanda as such. Why couldn't they just try and show the mere barbarism of what really happened. Like the catholic church of rwanda got involved in massacres, like last days neighbors became murders over night - and the dimensions of the genocide itself which were unseen of since the shoa. 800'000 to 1 million people slaughtered within 3 months, for the greater part with machetes and other tools - very little of this does shine through the almost romantic story of a brave and pure man. Sometimes I think that such stories rather use events like the rwanda genocide for a historical background only: The main story seems to be this of heroism where in fact a mass killing among neighbours was going on in rwanda. what fits this picture is the way the rebels of the rlf are glorified in the end of the film. in fact, after they had kicked out parts of the hutu murder gangs, they started intense killing based on racist projections too. it is still unknown among historians how many the killed then, but figures may go up very, very high. But as I said - maybe the actual events aren't that important for hero-movies like this. What I liked about the film was the role of the u.n. and the post-colonialist governments as portrayed in "hotel rwanda": in fact the international community witnessed over months the mass murder.
Alexander
(2004)
A monument of monumentality - and a freudian nightmare!
12 January 2005
To keep things short and simple: this is without the slightest doubt the worst movie I've seen in the past years. It's truly monumental in its failure and when Theodor Adorno said (in his "Theory of Aesthetics") that art of greatest dignity is the one that is "un-identical" and offers no possibility to easily assimilate it - this must be art then! Never in my life have I seen a movie with such horrible acting (alone to speak of Angelina Jolie! the postmodern nightmare incarnated! a model that only lives off it's grotesque visible proportions and thereby functions like a screen for all kind of regressive projections) and such a bad, bad dramaturgy - it leaves you, the viewer, outside the story from beginning to end. or should i mention the anachronistic concept of "myth" and the omnipresent, cheap and dull Freudian symbolism? Or how about homosexuality in the movie which is treated with the same Hollywood-esquire fear as always? It's grotesque! When we see Alexander fugging, he does it with a woman - when he loves men, he treats them like brothers ... Or how about the amateurish cgi? The battle sequences which were about as dramatic and epic as the ones in "The Mummy" (the recent version). Holy hell - the longest 3 hrs of my life! I could go on for hours, but it's really not worth it. A true monument of what Hollywood has become - cheap, dull, lame-ass, below average, recycled, eclectic, normative, idiotic mass-consumption. Vote: below zero!
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