You Know Mr Gorbachev, The Guy That Ran Russia For So Long?

I can never really work out whether I think To Die For is overrated or underrated. I quite enjoy it, but is it actually good? All of the camp theatrics of the film - are they deliberate overplays designed almost to function in a Brechtian way, to stop you really relating to the characters and instead forcing you to analyse them critically? Or are they kind of just overplays. I'm tending to go with the former. I'm thinking I like the film.

Nicole Kidman plays Suzanne, a beautiful girl with no real talents but a true desire to succeed. She badgers her way on screen as a weather reporter for a local news station, and is constantly winning over her husband Larry (Matt Dillon) to get her way - manipulating him into submission is probably a more accurate way to describe her actions. Larry wants Suzanne to take time off her climbing of the corporate ladder in order to start a family, something Suzanne is not keen on. To this end, she begins a project with schoolkids and lures three of the dumbest and most hick into her trap. 


Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix) is the ringleader, probably the dumbest, and Suzanne seduces him one night at her house. Russel (Casey Affleck) seems to be a bit smarter but still follows Jimmy around as his foil, while Lydia (Alison Folland) idolises Suzanne and seems to have no one else to hang around with than the two brutes - I believe after rewatching To Die For that Lydia is in fact a lesbian, in love with Suzanne, unsure of how to deal with her teenage feelings in a small American town. Suzanne ends up bribing and cajoling the kids to off Larry, which they do, before Suzanne turns her backs on them and pretends to know nothing about it - she is let off from her charges due to entrapment technicalities employed by the police in gathering evidence against her. She thinks she has won, but in the end she does not, something shown with a great little cameo from David Cronenberg.


Kidman won her first Golden Globe for her terrific performance, combining devious planning with ditzy actions and making herself endlessly creepy yet undeniably watchable. Dillon played the shallow role of the husband well also - it wasn't much of a stretch in terms of complexity of character, and the camped nature of his performance suited his strengths. Affleck was strong in a small role, and Folland did decent work with her confused character (she is probably my weakest link in the cast, however), while Phoenix did terrific things with his down and dirty portrayal of someone who may in fact be on the verge of a medical diagnosis of mild retardation. His character allowed for the deepest character representation in a real sense on screen, and he grabbed hold of it and made it work for him. No wonder he went on to become the great performer he has since been recognised as.


The script from Buck Henry (based on the book by Joyce Maynard) was very clever, and the dialogue and narration from Suzanne was written perfectly. Director Gus Van Sant let the film take itself along, giving it a quirk but leaving it decidedly more accessible to the mainstream than his earlier works. He seems to dip in and out of mainstream in phases - following To Die For he ran around and made such films as Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, before dropping out again for the Death Trilogy (here and here), and now seems to be in and out much faster - Milk was serious yet commercial but upcoming Restless looks like it may play more akin to Paranoid Park.


Anyway, I've distracted myself. I like it. I do. 4 stars.

We're Here As Peace Keepers, Not As Peace Makers.

I remember, barely, when the unrest in Rwanda was going on back in 1994. I can barely remember the first Gulf War, I was, what, six when that all started going down, so the Rwandan genocide is the first major political and military incident of global importance that touched my consciousness. I was horrified reading what was happening there, seeing images on the news, as much as I didn't understand the historical context or even how these atrocities fit in within the greater sphere of war crimes through history.


So it was with some excitement that I finally approached Hotel Rwanda, it being a film about a period that I could, to some degree, relate to through my own memory, diluted as it is by time and countless other wars and massacres that have filled the intervening years.

Paul (Don Cheadle) is the hotel manager of the Sabena Hôtel des Milles Collines, a Dutch owned hotel in Rwanda. He is a Hutu, married to a Tutsi, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo.) As the Hutu rebellion rises, Paul finds himself in an unlikely position - he is decidedly apolitical, not seeing a racial difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis, or at least not caring about it. As Hotel Manager at this prestigious hotel (which is currently housing the UN) he has many influential friends politically and militarily who afford him respect, partly, I'm sure, due to his ability to supply them with fine scotch and cigars. So as the uprising grows more forceful, and with him being left in charge of the hotel as all foreign nationals flee, the hotel becomes a refuge for Tutsis seeking an escape from the marauding militia.


Amazingly, that paragraph fairly neatly sums up the entire theme of the film. It is a very simple concept, but the individual events that play out within that narrative framework provide a hell of a lot of dramatic tension and keep the story moving inexorably towards what may well be a hideous and bloody finale. Let's not forget that this genocide was epic, a serious and scarily effective policy of ethnic cleansing. Somewhere in the vicinity of a million people were killed over the course of this exercise if my memory serves correct - that's a vast number in quite a short space of time.


It is an important and a powerful film. Cheadle initially looks to struggle with the gravity associated with his role, doing his best to look serious and play the powerful dramatic lead, but settles in to make Paul his own by the end. It's a good performance, if not one for the history books. Okonedo is in control the whole time but spends too much of the film bordering on hysterical, right from the get-go. Nick Nolte as the UN Colonel helping Paul and his refugees out wherever he could was excellent in his brash professionalism, letting his emotions spill over only once or twice and with a perfect pitch. It was Jaoquin Phoenix's foreign journalist, however, who really got me. A very small role, as he departs the hotel his underplayed anger and forceful delivery of the line 'Oh, God, I'm so ashamed' brought tears instantly to my eyes and brings goosebumps back to my arms even now. It is the ultimate in white guilt - where the fuck were we? How could we have let that happen, knowing what was going on moment by moment, especially early on?


All in all, the themes and the steady performances kept the film up to a decent level. Visually, Hotel Rwanda looked quite flat. There was nothing interesting at all in the photography by Robert Fraisse. But the script was good, co-written by director Terry George, who also let the film run itself along, not really interfering to give the story centre stage.

So, not a brilliant film technically, but a strong one emotionally. 4 stars.