kayester

Films like this should never be forgotten, never put away. They remind us that no matter how parlous our current times seem, they weren't less dangerous then. In this era of suicide bombers it is too easy to forget it was that students marched out of their classrooms for air raid drills, when people built fallout shelters in their backyard, and the newspapers printed maps with the kill rates for distances from ground zero printed on them. The War Game is a strong reminder.

The film is quite simply a pseudo-documentary of a nuclear attack on England in the mid-1960s. It is doubly chilling for the matter-of-fact the narrative and the unflinching camera. Viewed today, in glorious black and white, it seems to be more a report of an actual event than the what-if film it was originally intended to be.

Bertolucci is a director who doesn't keep making the same movie.

Little Buddha has much about it that can be praised. It shows much, tells some, and demands of the viewer some thought. This is not something always appreciated by the viewer. The key to understanding this movie, I believe, is not the search for the reincarnation of an important Buddhist teacher, nor is it the life of the Buddha up to the time he achieves enlightenment, but the way a child, or children, and an old man, come to understand together something of the connections that may exist between themselves. We don't see through a character's eyes, we watch the effects of the characters on each other. In particular, Jesse, the 9 year old American who may or may not be the reincarnation, holds our attention because we watch him absorb the lessons that are being taught, and as he learns them, he grows in ways we can expect a 9 year old to grow. We also watch his father, whose character becomes more sympathetic as the movie progresses, who has even further to grow than his son, because he has already learned too much.

The movie is also beautiful to watch. The cinematography, the editing and the direction combine to provide just the right dramatic tension to a movie whose pacing is deceptive, in that it seems slow, but is not. The ultimate result is that a viewer who allows it, will find him or herself transported for a little while, to unexpected places.

I've thought about this video a few times since I saw it, mostly because I've been undecided as to whether it works or not. In the end, I am swayed by my rereading of the play to feel it does work. The key to seeing it this way is to recognize that Shakespeare's King Richard II is an exceedingly vain monarch, acting always without considering the repercussions of his sometimes thoughtless actions. David Birney captures this vanity quite well in the first half of the play, and continues in this vein into the final act, where the words are thoughtful, but it is easy to read into them a final grandiose vanity.

I prefer Derek Jacobi's performance, but I think it worth an interested viewer's time to compare the two, because they are very different in their affect.