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I had a couple of beers before I went, but I was still surprised that my body was shaken with sobs more than once while I watched Hotel Rwanda, again even when I walked out on the sidewalk. I looked at the faces around me...I think it shook everyone in the theater up.

I wasn't sure when I planned to go if I should be more worried because it would be too polished, or that that there would be too many graphic scenes of people getting hacked up with machetes. Turns out it was a fairly good balance. They kept it to a real human movie, without descending completely into the utter madness it must have been like.

I knew a little about what happened. When I got a little interested about what's happening in Darfour (I even wrote a little about it in the Wikipedia), and read about parallels to Rwanda, I read a little about it. Almost a million Rwandans were killed by organized militia, and even ordinary neighbors. Most of the killing was done with a machete.

The Wikipedia has a small article about it in their history of Rwanda section, and Human Rights Watch has an excellent book online for free that goes into great detail.

In 1994, right around the time Kurt Cobain blew his brains out in his Seattle home (I was drinking coffee at a Rockford, IL Denny's that day, I never heard anything about Rwanda), all hell broke loose in Rwanda and a man named Paul Rusesabagina, a manager at a four-star hotel in Rwanda, wheedled, negotiated, bribed and intimidated and somehow managed to keep the over 1200 people who came to the hotel as refugees from being slaughtered.

Regardless of its importance (which to me, is considerable) it is an excellent movie. It's a movie about Africa, a movie about racism (in more ways than would be obvious) and a movie about humanity at it's truly best and truly worst. Don Cheadle handled himself pretty damn well, and it's pretty cool to see even a dramatization of something like this.

It hurts me to think that what happened, which is like the worst horror movie ever, that came alive for these people, is still basically happening in other parts of this "civilized" world.