Rhapsody in August

If Kurosawa's execrable Dreams ended up as a moron's guide to the Green manifesto, here we are presented with a child's primer to the evils of war. Four children are spending the summer at their grandma's home near Nagasaki while their parents are visiting the old lady's long-lost brother in Hawaii. Thanks to grandma's tales of 1945, when America's atomic bomb killed her husband, the kids learn the importance of never forgetting the lessons of the past, and of blaming war itself rather than foreigners. All's well until Clark (Gere) - the old lady's Japanese-American nephew - announces his imminent arrival: will he imagine that his Japanese cousins hate him for the Bomb, and so dash the kids' parents' dreams of an easier life? Who cares would be a tempting response, were it not for the often touching performances. There's more narrative movement here than in Dreams, but the pedagogic humanism still gets bogged down in facile simplification.