La La Land Obsessed with Reality!!

If you follow movies at all, you’re bound to have noticed that actors and directors are forever talking about how their movies are “relevant”, or “of the moment”, or “about things that are happening right now”. Sometimes it’s even true. But more often than not, a movie produced about a specific event or issue will feel instantly out of date, the result of the year or two that it takes to turn an idea into a finished feature film.To mark the arrival of Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, an of-the-moment drama about the U.S. Army’s policy of refusing to discharge soldiers after their terms of service are up, here’s a look at the way the movies have tried to tackle the issues of the day.RWANDA You wouldn’t think that Rwanda qualifies as a current story, given that the genocidal assault on the nation’s Tutsis by Hutu agitators – in which anywhere from 800,000 to one million people were killed, mostly by machete – happened fourteen years ago. But when Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda indicted Western indifference to the slaughter, and star Don Cheadle started using the film to draw parallels to the unfolding horrors in Darfur, a number of other directors suddenly felt they needed to tell Rwanda stories. (Surely, this had nothing to do with Cheadle and George scoring some high-profile Oscar nominations for their work.) Peter Raymont’s disturbing documentary Shake Hands with the Devil – which accompanied Gen. Romeo Dallaire back to Rwanda a decade after his failure to stop the explosion of violence – was already underway, so it gets a pass. But the other films – Robert Favreau’s A Summer in Kigali, Michael Caton-Jones’ preachy Shooting Dogs and Roger Spottiswoode’s TV-safe Shake Hands with the Devil, a fictionalization of Dallaire’s book starring Roy Dupuis as the General – don’t add anything to the conversation, just rehashing the facts in an attempt to me-too their way to relevance.