Some Mother’s Son

Somewhere between the pseudo-humanistic family dramas of Eastern Europe, and the Hollywood of Dark Helmet playing with his dolls, you will find the Irish cinema nowadays.

Not too long ago, Kiri Te Kanawa in a Los Angeles radio interview offered the opinion that the opera game was all about getting “butts in seats.” It’s hard to say what Some Mother’s Son is all about, but it has a few moments, such as Fionnula Flanagan as an IRA mother offering a Valium to an uncommitted friend in a moment of crisis. Emblematic of the whole film is a beautiful shot of the Irish seacoast (Beckett’s “the shingle and the dune”), employed as a backdrop to a bit of cornball humor and a tiny flash of insight.

 

Hotel Rwanda

The Hotsie-Totsie War, being the real dramatized experience of a Hotsie hotelier with a Totsie wife, his Hotsie-Totsie guests come under the guns of a brutal Hotsie army, Totsies are being butchered like fresh meat just down the road, a UN commander after many vicissitudes leads them all to safety behind the Totsie lines and abroad.