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Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Culture Update

I just got back from seeing Hotel Rwanda, a true story about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. For locals, the film will be showing at the Michigan Theater through February 17--I highly recommend it. The movie was similar in many ways to one I watched on DVD just a week ago--The Killing Fields. That 1984 film followed the story of two people, a NY Times writer and his Cambodian assistant as they tried to survive the genocide in Cambodia in the mid to late 1970's. In both films an enclave of foreigners and hunted natives is able to survive rampaging mobs in a compound with minimal physical protection. In "The Killing Fields" it was the US and then the French embassy in Phnom Penh; in "Hotel Rwanda" it was the Belgian Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali, protected only by a small squad of UN troops and some timely bribes.

In the written culture department, I recently read Nelson DeMille's novel Night Fall. The book is based on the explosion of TWA 800 on July 17, 1996, when some 200 eyewitnesses claimed that they saw something that looked more or less like a missile headed towards the plane before it blew up. These accounts were not taken into account in the "official" report on the crash, which blamed a spark in the center fuel tank as the only culprit. DeMille's book works pretty closely with the actual facts of the case, adding only an adulterous couple filming themselves on the beach and accidentally capturing the missile on videotape, and a cop who keeps digging. Since I'm pretty much a believer in the TWA 800 conspiracy theories, I found the book to be fascinating. And it has an ending you won't forget.