More Than Entertainment: Hotel Rwanda Review

In a period of just one hundred days, over 800,000 people were horrifically slaughtered. The genocide that Rwanda experienced in 1994 was one of the worst in recent decades, but nothing that should have been a surprise to the world; the two ethnic groups – the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis – have had tension ever since Britain colonial times. What is surprising is that 90% of the entire Tutsi population was brutally murdered while the world stood by and did nothing to stop it. “Hotel Rwanda” does a phenomenal job of portraying this true story from the perspective of one man who tried, and did make a courageous difference amidst a hopeless and terrifying reality.

The movie begins with the eerie sound of a radio playing with a black screen, which somberly foreshadows the events that will unfold in the movie. The movie picks up as the Hutu President of Rwanda is going to sign a peace agreement with the Tutsi rebel movement, but is murdered. Hutu extremists blame the President’s death on the “Tutsi cockroaches” and use it as a motive to begin the all out violent slaughter of the people. Here the movie starts to follow the true story of Paul Rusesabagina, a manager of a European resort in the capital city Kigali. Rusesabagina himself is a Hutu, but his wife, Tatiana and children are Tutsi. Because of this – and because Rusesabagina’s character seems very sensible – he does not follow most of the other Hutus into the extremist Interahamwe militia to kill off all Tutsis. Throughout the movie, Rusesabagina uses his European business connections and favors to powerful and wealthy Hutus to escape his own death and also saves his family and makes the resort a safe-shelter for 1,268 Tutsi refugees.

One of the first things I noticed about this movie is that despite its violent topic, it keeps the graphic and gory images to a bare minimum. I really liked this because I think that sometimes in our pop culture we show graphic and disturbing images to the point that we are desensitized to it. Director Terry George makes an excellent choice not to show excessive amounts of dead bodies because when they are shown, it makes it that much more significant. They do this by not showing close ups, or only briefly showing the dead corpses. Throughout the movie there are four or five points at which I thought, “are they going to die? What’s going to happen?” The fact that the film never settles into a comfortable or predictable place kept my full attention, when I often find in other movies that I get distracted or bored with the predictability of the plot. Also noteworthy are the acting jobs of the the main characters, played by Don Cheadle (who plays Paul Rusesabagina) and Sophie Okonedo (who plays his wife Tatiana). Both Cheadle and Okonedo play their parts so well that I didn’t even think of them as actors, but as the characters. Cheadle and Okonedo embody and express the desperation and despair that I can imagine Rusesabagina felt during the actual time. I enjoy this movie so much because it isn’t just mindless entertainment. When I watched the film, I felt like it was something that was worth my time to watch because of the real meaning and value of this tragedy. It shows just how easily people will follow the norms of society and fall into peer pressure.

Although “Hotel Rwanda” does a number of things well, it does have its fallbacks too. The movie isn’t westernized as some, but it still has elements like foreshadowing thunderstorms, lights randomly going out and a torrential downpour before a sadder scene. Historically the movie isn’t completely accurate at times; the movie blatantly states that the reason that the United Nations left Rwanda and that western nations didn’t intervene was because they were racist against blacks. This isn’t true, because during the early 90’s the head of the UN’s peacekeeping organization was a black man from Ghana. The film also fails to explain a critical reason why and how the genocide occurred in Rwanda. During the three months that the mass murdering occurred, the international media was focused on South Africa’s Nelson Mandela leading the nation’s first all race elections. Since all the focus was on South Africa, the Hutus realized their opportunity to try to kill all the Tutsis without the international community noticing. It also leaves out how the genocide was able to take place to the extent it did; Rwanda was a gun free zone, which meant that the Tutsi victims had little to no means of fighting back against the murders – which is also why most didn’t try to run or fight back against the Hutu extremists.

Despite “Hotel Rwanda’s” historical inaccuracies and the inevitable modernization of the true story, this movie is more than worth seeing. At times it may seem inconveniently depressing, but the ultimately inspiring tale of Paul Rusesabagina overcomes the sadness. “Hotel Rwanda” has something important to teach us about an overlooked time in history and the ability of one individual to make an impact on the lives of over 1,000 people through the selfless act of standing up against inhumanity.

Marijuana & Mexico's Drug War

The topic of Mexico's drug war is something that has interested me for a couple years now, and has recently been getting more attention in connection with Prop 19 in California - legislation that would legalize marijuana in the state. Many people focus on the personal or economic appeals of whether marijuana sould be legalized or not, but in my research I'd like to explore the international implications of the possible actions that could be taken in regards to marijuana (de-regulation, de-criminalization, ect). My first source argues that legalizing marijuana would not end Mexico's drug war. Zach Behren's article points out that even if America legalized marijuana, Mexico's drug cartels would still be selling methamphetamine and cocaine to customers in the US (para. 3). Because these drugs have severe health repercussions, they will never be considered for legalization, and therefore the cartels will always have a customer base and won't be put out of business. So maybe legalization isn't the answer, but we still need to be apart of the solution to our joint problem.

Work Cited
Behrens, Zach. "Will Legalizing Marijuana End Mexico's Drug War? Well, 'Maybe Not' - LAist." LAist: Los Angeles News, Food, Arts & Events. 13 Sept. 2010. Web. 10 Oct. 2010. .

Money = Happiness (?)

"If only I had more money I'd be more content and have less problems."
Within the United States, almost everyone is chasing after the illusion of "The American Dream". What once was the pursuit of happiness has now been transformed by society into the pursuit of wealth. Many people believe that their life would be better if only they made more money, or that they'd be more content. And who's to say that they're wrong for thinking this? Looking at today's mainstream pop culture, everything from music to television shows to influential figures show us that having more money is what makes life good. But is this true? To an extent is it, but on the whole, no it is not. Surveys and research show that once people start making that little bit of extra money, they just crave more and more. The happiness that people chase after as they make more and more money slips farther and farther away the faster they run. Having extravagant material objects doesn't fulfill people if they don't (at the tip of the iceberg) have people to enjoy this success with, and doesn't make people happy from moment to moment in life. This is a personal experience, but it's also a statistical one. Princeton University reports that men that make $20,000 spend 34.7% of their time on "passive leisure" - aka non-work related activities - compared to men who made over $100,000 spending only 19.9% of their time doing activities they enjoyed outside of their work (http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/index.xml?section=topstories).

So why does making a lot of money matter if you don't even have any time to enjoy it? My personal experience from talking to doctors and CEOs backs up my personal belief of these statistics as well. Five out of six doctors that I've talked to have expressed that the amount of time they spend at their job (and the time it takes away from their personal lives) isn't worth the money they make, and five out of five CEOs had the same responses. Making money to achieve happiness is simply not a valid reason for the chase that has consumed our nation. If you love what you do and the money comes along with it, great. But don't sacrifice what you do love for an empty pursuit of happiness; you've probably already found it where you're at.

The Five-Themed Paragraph: Helpful or Hurtful?

        What if all the things we were being taught in school were of no relative use in the real world? Would people still go to school? Would there be any point in going to school if nothing we learned would help us in life? Hopefully the answers for most would be no to the latter questions. This leads us to the five-themed paragraph. This is a structure that is commonly taught but of no practical use once we are out of school. So why are we being taught it? Furthermore, is it hurtful to us as students to have this structure be exemplified to us as the way we should write? To take it a step even further, should the citizens of the US be paying taxes for kids to go to school and be cheated of learning real/useful writing skills?

        I think it's always important to consider the other views of an argument no matter what your stance is. For this reason, let's examine the pro-five paragraph side for a moment. In defense of the structure being taught, it must be taken into consideration that most high school teachers have an enormous number of students to teach, and in turn an overload of papers that they must grade every time they assign a paper. So assigning these five-paragraph themed papers makes it easier on the teachers who are underpaid for all they do to get through more than 200 papers. Also, it is a valid point that the five-paragraph gives students a basic structure to learn to build ideas on.

         But, is it worth it to make the load easier to all students' detriment? To send them off to college unprepared to write different types of papers such as narrative or research papers? The five-paragraph can very easily constrain the writer. It's hard to fit all your ideas into, can be awkward to work with (not all subject types can fit the structure), and most significantly it doesn't teach how to write creatively and learn how to make our own structure. It limits us. When graded in a five-paragraph theme, teachers can't look at the content of our ideas. How are students supposed to know if the substance of their work is good if they are only being critiqued for if they can fill a certain structure with disregard to what that structure says about any given topic?

        The five-paragraph theme is an excellent starting point for students to learn basic writing skills. But if this idea isn't built upon, students writing can't improve writing or develop more complex ideas. This leaves many that can't conform to the structure feeling like bad or failed writers. Students should be taught this structure, but then be taught how to build upon it and learn how to create their own structure and more thoroughly delve into ideas. Real-life application and preparation for the next part of a student's life is what should be kept in mind when schools decide what to teach students. Not the easiest way to grade a paper. Please, start teaching us skills we’ll need and make our school experience worthwhile.