[Buddha-l] nytimes review of pbs The Buddha

[JKirkpatrick]

Nothing like a predictable NYT movie review. 

For a start, they can always be relied on to make a snide remark
about HHDL, as in "the Dalai Lama (projecting irascibility)", a
reference to Bob Thurman's film actress daughter (who cares?),
calling the poets W. S. Merwin '(compelling)' and Jane Hirshfield
'(oddly intense)'.  
Oh really? I watched the trailer.  Merwin was distinctly
uncompelling as well as annoyingly mumbly & gravel-voiced, while
Hirshfield was just somebody speaking about something; "slightly
druggy animations"?---we can be sure that any review of anything
visual having to do with Indian swamis, mystics, and buddhas will
be assaulted by the epithet "druggy".  
"We also get a lot of pretty footage of the Indian countryside
"--if the film had been made by a French or Danish documentarist,
the landscape footage would have been labeled "magnificent"
rather than merely pretty.

I go along with this bit: "Little if any of the art is identified
or explained, reflecting a larger tendency not to put what we're
seeing or hearing in a specific context. And it's never clear
whether the narrator, Richard Gere, is reading Mr. Grubin's words
or excerpts from an unnamed Buddhist text." Yes:
non-documentation is a feature characteristic of a lot of (if not
most) made-for-wide-distribution film so-called 'documentaries'.
The reviewer Mike Hale's (who is he?) remaining snide remarks
about the film could have alluded to similar characteristics of
other lousy films made about religions, such as King of Kings,
The Ten Commandments, or The Passion of the Christ, for ex.,
(even if those were not documentaries, although supposedly about
a real person), but there are a lot of others just as bad. 

I'll watch the film, but with the expectation that so far there's
never been a film about a religious (spiritual? universal
message?) figure that was any good. Perhaps it can't be done.
Better perhaps to pay heed to the movies about our gurus in our
minds andin the texts, rather than on the magic screen?

Joanna



__________________________________________
A review of the upcoming PBS show on The Buddha

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/arts/television/07buddha.html?h
pw

Dan
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