Reviews

Calling this film pretensious might be easy for someone not quite interested in the exploration Grandieux essays here. This film is more an essay than it is a conventional narrative. Praising it as boundary-breaking is also easy enough. The conflict between commercial features and artistic oriented films is there before this film and structures most of the reactions one will get from people who have watched it. This is as groundbreaking as a good narrative can be, it all depends on where your inclinations linger. But despite that, this film has some wonderfully achieved aesthetic gems. As for the plot, it's all about ambiguity and undefinition. It's about violence and lack of familiar bonds. All the exchanges between characters are troubled and not actual exchanges, power relations maybe. People are lost between sex and impotence, necessity and compulsion. Although there is no familiarity, there is an intense sexually ambiguous intimacy. It tries to suffocate you and in my opinion it is too deliberate in it, it tries to manipulate you through sound and frantic camera motion, taking it as far as to declare itself overtly ostentatious. It's excess. No problem there. I didn't find it a masterpiece. I won't say it isn't worth the look either. It's surely a quest for his own style on the part of Grandieux!

It's curious to see so many people complaining about inaccuracy in a film such as this. Frist of all that's why it's called fiction and not reality. Directors are free to elaborate their metaphors to convey some sort of feeling through the film. The film in itself is actually not that special but it captures the viewer and builds tension as the whole thing displays. This is actually a film that echoes a lot of what nowadays is our world. It doesn't demonize Iraqis but it also doesn't grants us entry to their world. Maybe there's a point there, you can only fight a war if you have an enemy, otherwise you couldn't ever hold people at gunpoint. I'm not a war expert and certainly don't intend to be. I can understand how some people that have commented here, and have been on Iraq, get disappointed as they don't see what they have been through portrayed. But at the same time, the reality of protocol, the chain of command, the handling of the situations, the details with which you can fill a film feature don't immediately make a film more accurate. How about all other films you praise without making such a claim to "reality"? Why this one could be any different? I can make an example out of it ... do you think that what you saw in a film as Blood Diamond for example amounts to something about Sierra Leone? Can you check it out? It means only this is closer to your heart, but that's your "claim" on the film. It's not compulsory to the film director to "document". Now, this film doesn't go down because of these claims, but because the characters are shallow. The character who, still, has something is the main one. Unfortunately he is a "hero" and "heroes" act on what the French call «fierté», something that could be translated as «bravery». But this bravery where does it lead us? What does he accomplish with this bravery? Going back! He is not stupid. But the world where he comes from has become standardized sufficiently so that he prefers bombs to his wife and son? Or is he supposed to take on some sort of destiny, preferring to be killed instead of others. So he's a martyr, like any suicide bomber. And, in this sense, this appears to be a Christian film about an unaccomplished martyrdom. He's not Jesus that's for sure. In the end, i find it propagandistic, without a cause. IT's not "rebel without a cause", it's "playing martyr without a cause". But hey, is it not that this epoch is all about people not having causes? Maybe this is actually about cynicism. Not enriching. I could think of much better use for the money spent doing it.

Although filmed with a sort of contemporary touch in aesthetics and camera works this film is a let down. The character never seem to capture the viewer who is simply rambling through the cliché far-fetched kind of plans. It seems to try to compensate in aesthetic exacerbation what it lacks in simplicity and dramatic quality. It comes out as a hard to develop kind of thing and it simply doesn't take advantage of so many possibilities left to explore, from the actual roots of capoeira, to the potential in most of the characters. The characters are also a bunch of stereotypical sketch and never leave that numb state to let out some actual personality. Everyone just goes where they're expected to go and do what they are supposed to do. That's nothing else than lack of inventiveness and failure to capture the essence of smaller and less obvious connections. Not totally a waste of time, but almost. Not recommended.

One can rate movies according to what they bring of "newness" to our horizons. For me this movie hasn't added anything and i can only say that to the people this movie was a "widening" of some sort, then you must have been asleep before you saw it. The first objective criticism i have to make is that once you have visited Africa you cannot relate to the images in Hotel Rwanda. We see the movie as if we are in a western suburban area and that, i might say, as nothing to do with the feel of Africa. Throughout the film we seem to be taken through a somewhat digestible version of scenarios for western bourgeois audience.

Sure enough that the film is talking about a sensitive issue and how the circumstances enforce heroic acts on the part of the main character. But if we go a bit deeper into the portrayal of Rwanda's reality then we find this film has no specific content other than the poor commercialization of conflict, and i would say that's mediatic malady. I'm sure Tutsi survivors may have praised the film as something important. But talking in cinematic terms this film is a hoax. The horror of Rwanda is much more darker on the whole of humanity than this film can show. One would have to film constant panic to get a bit closer.

It's not Hollywood made but it is still the same formula. In my opinion: don't watch it! It has the stink of culpabilization on it. I'm sorry for writing such a bad review but i'm just being honest.

It's a film about the journey of a man, born with leg and torso athrophy, taking his mother's ashes to the spring of the river ganges, and at the same time his interior journey of belief and reward with purification in the mountains of the Himalaias. He travels 6000 Kms and back. While 14 out of the 16 people that started off this journey end up quitting, only him and his newly met companion meet the goal. It's a story about man's earthly divinization, about a light that sparkles on the man that allows himself abandonment of himself to atman, The Soul. From Varanasi to Calcutta, from the roads to the trains, from his village and back to it. Throughout the film the water of mother ganga has the power to clean the body as well as the soul, and this particular characteristic achieves its climax as he takes water back to his village and distributes it between the villagers in a social gathering, a celebration where the pilgrims that achieved their defying journey have the obligation of giving the party, preparing food. All in all, we're taken alongside a view of spirituality in its transcendental questioning and we are made to construe the meaning ourselves, since Honkasalo doesn't deliberately guides us to a fixed conclusion.