Terry George
2004
121 minutes
This is another film you missed when it initially came out and you never quite got around to crossing it off your list. You correctly guessed that it sounded like a depressing watch that would spoil any good mood you were currently in. Now that the days of good moods are mostly over, it won't hurt much to sneak in some depressing shit you missed out on like this. It's about the Rwandan genocide.
The characters in this spend a lot of time being harassed by groups of men using machetes as an ethnic cleansing tool. You had a machete when you were a kid, a dented antique that your uncle brought back from Korea as part of his Army service. It was relatively dull, but still hazardous to children who were dumb enough to treat it as a toy and climb trees and actually hit things with it as though it were a sword. Needless to say it was one of your favorite toys. You used to take it out in the yard with a cheap bag of potatoes. The potatoes would be the bad guys and you would kill them with your machete.
You also had a rope, and sometimes you would play sheriff and threaten the potatoes with the machete before tying the rope into a noose, attaching the noose to a tree, and executing the potatoes as though they were outlaws. It must be pointed out that there was no racial or ethnic aspect to these potato executions. You treated all potatoes as equals, whether they were red, russett, or white potatoes. All faced a harsh but fair justice at your vigilante hands.
When you had your late night radio show, you would frequently end up going down rabbit holes where you would play unusual music from odd sources. Some of the albums you would play music from had innocent sounding music with macabre origins--songs written by Charles Manson or the cult that released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway or songs from the Rwandan genocide. These songs all made you suspicious of the actual content of the songs played on the world music shows for the happy progressives of Madison who loved the worldiness of world music, while having zero understanding of the lyrics. Listening to these shows without knowing what the lyrics meant was always a bit disturbing to you. For all you knew, you were bopping your head to the "Happy Female Circumcision Song" or something similarly vile.
You recall playing one song in particular called "I Hate Hutus", which was a hit song in Rwanda during the Rwandan genocide. The song sounded like a regular African pop song, but the lyrics were encouraging Hutus to rise up and kill the Tutsi "cockroach" colonizer-collaborating Tutsis who were ruining their country. You would always play songs like these without explanation before informing your listeners of what they had just been enjoying. One of the horrors of this film is the recurring voice on the radio of one of the announcers playing such music and exhorting his listeners to carry out this genocide.
In retrospect, you feel a bit horrified that you may have been a bit too flippant about playing these songs and you can only hope that none of your night owl listeners had to listen to the track firsthand when it was popular on the radio in their homeland.
Time to choose something different: