Last movie seen: 7 Years in Tibet.
An ideal "sequel" to The Last Emperor, in the sense that after having seen through the eyes of Pu-Yi the fall of the chinese dinasty and the rise of a republic and then of a communist regime, we can now follow how China settled internal business conquering Tibet.
I must confess I didn't really know much about the movie, working from home I have additional time to spare, I knew it was famous, I knew I would get nice views of Tibet, I thought "well, why not". I didn't know it was set in World War II.
Excellent movie, maybe a bit long, but it was very good. You gotta feel for the protagonist: he's an austrian, Nazi Germany annexes his nation, he goes to the Himalayas and gets both imprisoned and divorced from afar, and eventually winds up in Tibet. He finds peace and a new purpouse in life in a breathtakingly beautiful landscape, an isolated heaven on earth........ and then China comes to annex Tibet with violence. What an ultimate bummer. It's like escaping city life by finding a cabin in the woods, only to find out that they're gonna built an highway and a commercial centre near that cabin. Multiplied tenfold with the horrors of war and death.
I also got my dates mixed up a little and it took me a while to figure that THAT Dalai Lama was THIS Dalai Lama, the current one. I knew he's old but I didn't realize how actually old he is, and that it was him as a child back then.
So I saw two movies in a row where a figurehead, be it political or religious, loses their status or at least the possibility to live in their own palace because of the chinese revolution. Bummer!