Word: harrer
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...would be, were this not the season in which the world of American entertainment became fascinated with Buddhism. Neither Seven Years nor Kundun is overtly about the faith. The first recounts the story of Pitt's character, Heinrich Harrer, a superstar mountain climber and Nazi poster boy who is humanized while tutoring the preteen Dalai Lama in Tibet in the 1940s and '50s. The second tells the remarkable tale of the Dalai Lama more or less through his own eyes, from his recognition as reincarnated Buddha of compassion at age two until his escape to India at 24. Each film...
...remote kingdom to find a new truth. An ideal Aryan who befriends a boy of the yellow race, he dumps Hitler for the Dalai Lama. A man bred on competition, he becomes a missionary for peace and enlightenment. Sounds as though there's a movie in Heinrich Harrer's life...
...blowing at 90 m.p.h., there's dust in your eyes, bombs going off, and he's shouting in this wild French accent, 'We must shoot. We must shoot now!' He's like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now." Sounds as though Jean-Jacques Annaud is just the fellow to film Harrer's life...
...interaction between Harrer and the Dalai Lama is quite touching, even sweet. Harrer is called on to tutor the 12-year-old religious sovereign in the ways of the west, and the child's extreme patience and innocent wisdom, coupled with an incredibly warm smile, make him very endearing...
While the audience is eating this up with a spoon, Annaud smoothly slips in political issues concerning China's occupancy of Tibet and the ongoing struggle of the Dalai Lama to maintain Tibet's traditional peaceful position. Both Harrer and we the viewers--who have been in parallel states of emotional responsiveness the whole way through--are at this point immediately receptive and sympathetic to the urgency of the Tibetan cause. In only half a movie, the audience comes to buy a complete shift in a character's personality, a familial reconciliation which was at first daunting and allegiance...