A prep course for the month-long World Cup soccer tournament, a worldwide pheno

 At one point Bruck raises the possibility that Hillary might even seek to succe

ed Bill in his current job : `` Some friends have suggested that her goal now ma

y well be to become president herself , '' Bruck writes . `` Betsey Wright ( Gov

ernor Bill Clinton 's chief of staff ) told me last December , `` There are a gr

eat many people talking very seriously about her succeeding him . Their staff wi

ll say , `` We have to do it this way and that way , and then we 'll be here at 

least twelve years . '' And it 's not just the staff . Friends , Democrats , peo

ple out across the country think it is a very viable plan of action. ' ' ' Since

 The New Yorker came out Sunday , Wright has denied saying that , but The New Yo

rker is standing by the story . In Bruck 's account of Clinton 's health care re

form task force , the portrait 's especially severe ; the First Lady seems so ce

rtain of her own correctness that she will brook no criticism . `` In the end , 

that sureness about her own judgment at its extreme , a sense that she alone is 

wise is probably Hillary 's cardinal trait , '' Bruck writes . The Jackie model 

of how to be the president 's wife died with her . Maybe what we see in Bruck 's

 piece are the outlines of a new First Lady paradigm that , for better or worse 

, we 'd better start getting used to .

 WASHINGTON Andrew W. Mellon was exceptionally rich , and the Soviet Union broke

 , when , in the spring of 1930 , Mellon bought a 500-year-old painting for $ 50

0,000 right out of the Hermitage . For an additional $ 6,154,000 he soon got 20 

others , by Raphael and Rembrandt , Titian and van Dyck , Chardin and Velazquez 

, but none gratified him more than the first , a panel from an altarpiece by the

 early Netherlandish master Jan van Eyck of Bruges . Its condition was deplorabl

e , its companion panels lost , its scale unexceptional . Van Eyck 's `` Annunci

ation '' ( c. 1434/1436 ) is less than 15 inches wide . Still , the purchaser be

lieved , and not without good reason , that he had bought a monument of European

 art . For more than 50 years , that narrow , beat-up painting would be displaye

d in the museum Mellon gave his country , the National Gallery of Art here . The

n it was taken down . This week , after two years in the lab two years of carefu

l cleaning , high-tech examination and painstaking repair it goes on view again 

. The picture seems reborn , though it will never again look just as van Eyck ma

de it . Still , its dull varnish is gone , its bold blues have their brightness 

back , and its many missing paint flecks there were hundreds , maybe thousands h

ave been seamlessly filled in . The picture 's conservation was primarily conduc

ted by the gallery 's David Bull , a former museum director ( he used to run the

 Norton Simon in Pasadena , Calif. ) who has a scholar 's eye and a sure , rock-

steady hand . Look as closely as you wish at the in-painting he 's done , and tr

y to find a flaw . Gabriel , the archangel , smiling with delight , has just app

eared to Mary to announce the Incarnation . His angelic salutation , Ave gratia 

plena ( `` Hail , full of grace '' ) the letters writ in gold floats out of his 

mouth like a holy exhalation . The scepter that he holds is of rock crystal , no

t glass . Van Eyck was a magician . What one cannot quite believe is the physica

lity of his sight . The capitals that crown the columns in the picture have been

 carved so finely with interweaving tendrils , complex Celtic strapwork , with w

arriors and with steeds that you feel each chisel mark . Gabriel 's garments , t

oo , are endowed with such tactility that you somehow know the softness of their

 velvets , the stiff weight of their threads of gold , the slightly gritty gleam

ings of their countless sewn-on pearls . Even from an inch away , van Eyck 's su

rfaces don't fall apart into streaks of paint . His manner has uncanny depth ; h

is details on details go on and on and on . `` He knew fabrics like the weaver ,

 from whose looms they have flowed , '' wrote the scholar Max J. Friedlander , `

` buildings like an architect , the earth like a geographer , plants like a bota

nist . '' `` From the sheer sensuous beauty of a genuine Jan van Eyck , '' agree

d Erwin Panofsky , the Princeton iconographer , `` there emanates a strange fasc

ination not unlike that which we experience when we permit ourselves to be hypno

tized by precious stones or when looking into deep water . ''

 HOLLYWOOD There was a memorable moment in `` Beverly Hills Cop '' when Eddie Mu

rphy 's Axel Foley jammed a banana in a parked police car 's tailpipe . Walking 

out of `` Beverly Hills Cop III , '' you may be moved to ask , `` Anybody have a

 banana for this movie ? '' The existence of this film is a testament to star po

wer or , to be more precise , recycling power . We 're supposed to be so gratefu

l to once again see Eddie Murphy as Axel that we can overlook how crude and shop

worn this picture really is . It 's one of the most cynically engineered sequels

 ever . The kicky appeal of the `` Cop '' series at least potentially has always

 been the idea of a street-smart black cop from Detroit who outmaneuvers the ( m

ostly ) white Beverly Hills honchos who underestimate him . It 's a neat racial 

joke that provided a few chuckles in `` Beverly Hills Cop '' and virtually none 

in its hyper-powered , Stallone-ish sequel . Stallone , in fact , was originally

 supposed to star in `` Beverly Hills Cop , '' and the series has never gotten v

ery far from his over-muscled shadow . For most of the way in `` Beverly Hills C

op III '' ( MPAA rated R ) we might as well be watching any old standard-issue a

ction hunk dodging bullets and lobbing grenades ( and , in a masterstroke , savi

ng children in peril ) . But Murphy gives us less than those action hunks do ; h

e 's playing out his own fantasy image of a righteous avenger , and the fantasy 

is essentially humorless . There 's little trace of his gift for con-man mimicry

 . It 's as if he set out to trash his own franchise . Once again Axel , wearing

 his Detroit Lions jacket , is brought back to Beverly Hills from Detroit to tra

ck down the killers of a close associate . And once again he gets propelled into

 shootouts and car chases with a clan of murderous nasties , headed by John Saxo

n and Timothy Carhart . Their base of operations is a theme park called WonderWo

rld , which how 'd you guess ? features a dinosaur ride . `` Jurassic Cop , '' a

nyone ? The Beverly Hills police force retains series regular Judge Reinhold , w

ho now has his own office and his own SWAT team . Bronson Pinchot also turns up 

again as the oddly accented Serge . He has graduated from an art gallery to a bo

utique selling personalized luxury weapons , which is a fair way of gauging how 

far the inspiration in this series has dropped . At a time when police detective

 shows on television are better than they ever have been , what excuse is there 

for the slovenliness of `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' ? Director John Landis and s

creenwriter Steven E. de Souza ( who worked on `` 48 HRS. '' and the `` Die Hard

 '' films ) are strictly smash-and-grab guys . Like the other films in the serie

s , this one has no muscle tone ; it wobbles opportunistically between wan slaps

tick and routine bang bang , with lots of gratuitous cheesecake for scenery . It

 's not easy to make audiences laugh at a comedy where characters are actually s

hot on camera . And , in the post-Rodney G. King era , a racially tinged film in

volving cops and violence in Los Angeles carries a lot of unwanted baggage . Tak

en simply as pure action , the mayhem in this movie may be routine but , in the 

context of a knockabout comedy it 's deeply offensive . The film begins with a b

unch of workmen in a Detroit auto shop shimmying to a record by the Supremes . T

he scene is played for broad , dumb laughs ; then , in a scene that 's not playe

d for laughs , they get bloodily ventilated . But it 's near the end , when the 

assorted good guys wobble and collapse into frame with their wounds , that the c

orruption of this enterprise sinks in . There 's a fundamental lack of human fee

ling in `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' that makes you want to avert your eyes from 

the people around you when the lights come up . Attending this movie makes you f

eel like an accomplice to the corruption .

 HOLLYWOOD When the editor of Tricycle , the Buddhist Review , one of the few jo

urnalists allowed on the set of `` Little Buddha , '' the new Bernardo Bertolucc

i film , wrote about her experience , one question continued to trouble her . Wh

at was the word `` Little '' doing in the title ? None of the filmmakers , it tu

rned out , could give her a satisfactory answer , but now that the picture itsel

f is here , the reason seems obvious . Despite its illustrious pedigree , `` Lit

tle Buddha '' turns out to have the sensibility of a children 's film , the most

 elaborate and expensive `` Afterschool Special '' ever to make it to the big sc

reen . Being a children 's film , of course , is not necessarily a negative thin

g , and aspects of `` Little Buddha '' ( MPAA rating : PG ) do linger pleasantly

 in the memory . But what lingers as well is the suspicion that this is a childr

en 's film at least partly by default , the product of too much goofy New Age re

verence and too little nuance and sophistication . Those who remember such Berto

lucci films as `` The Conformist '' and `` Last Tango in Paris '' may be surpris

ed at this turn in his career , but those pictures are deep in the director 's p

ast . More recently we 've seen the likes of `` The Last Emperor , '' which , it

s many Oscars notwithstanding , is best remembered for how everything looked , n

ot for what anyone said . In fact , especially when , as here , Bertolucci colla

borates with Vittorio Storaro , one of the world 's preeminent cinematographers 

, the director has a tendency to become a prisoner of his own particular gift fo

r luscious images , to assume that the dramatic side of things will more or less

 take care of itself . Story , however , can be neglected only at great risk , e

specially when two parallel tales are being told . The first begins in a Tibetan

 Buddhist monastery in modern-day Bhutan , where Lama Norbu ( Chinese actor Ying

 Ruocheng ) gets a telegram he 's been waiting for for nine years , a message th

at soon puts him on a jet headed for Seattle . Though all Buddhists believe in r

eincarnation , only Tibetan Buddhists believe that specific people , invariably 

great teachers , can be identified in their next incarnation . And Lama Norbu ha

s reason to believe that his own teacher , admittedly a man with a hell of a sen

se of humor , has been reincarnated as an 8-year-old American named Jesse Konrad

 ( newcomer Alex Wiesendanger ) . Not surprisingly nonplussed by this news are J

esse 's parents , Lisa ( Bridget Fonda ) and Dean ( singer Chris Isaak ) , a spr

ightly young couple who don't quite know what to make of all these robed and sha

ven monks appearing suddenly in their lives . They don't object , however , when

 Lama Norbu gives Jesse a child 's life of the Buddha . This little book forms t

he basis of `` Little Buddha 's '' second narrative strand , a film-within-a-fil

m set in Asia 2,500 years ago that details how the fun-loving Prince Siddhartha 

transformed himself into a great spiritual being . Though it plays at times like

 an infomercial on Eastern religions , this half of `` Little Buddha '' is the m

ost successful . For one thing , this is where Storaro 's photography and James 

Acheson 's production and costume design are at their best , making good use of 

the never-before-seen streets of Bhutan and creating opulent set pieces . And th

ough eyebrows and even entire faces were raised when it was announced that Keanu

 Reeves was going to play Siddhartha , in fact , he does what the part calls for

 as the golden youth shielded from misery and death who takes the path to enligh

tenment . Hewing closely to traditional texts , this part of `` Little Buddha ''

 comes off closest to the fable quality the filmmakers were apparently after . I

n the modern half , however , the lack of texture that is the film 's weakest li

nk is most evident . The Mark Peploe and Rudy Wurlitzer plot , from a story by t

he director , seems determined to take the drama out of every situation , while 

the accompanying dialogue is invariably hollow and unconvincing . Being blissed 

out may be an enviable state for a human being , but it is not necessary the bes

t one for a film .

 Bernardo Bertolucci may not know anything more about Eastern religion than I do

 , but I don't care . This is not to say his `` Little Buddha '' is inaccurate ,

 either in its portrayal of Tibetan Buddhist thought or the life of Siddhartha (

 Keanu Reeves ) , only that it doesn't really matter . What matters is what happ

ens on screen , and Bertolucci 's direction alone is the stuff of religious conv

ersion . The director , whose philosophical questing has taken him to China and 

North Africa in recent years ( for `` The Last Emperor '' and `` The Sheltering 

Sky '' ) has filmed his latest in the holy lands of Nepal , Bhutan and Seattle .

 And in telling his based-on-real-life story about a blond 9-year-old who is sus

pected of being a reincarnated lama and juxtaposing it with an epic recounting o

f the life of Prince Siddhartha who will become the Buddha Bertolucci reverses t

he tired conventions about ancient religions and religious life and in the proce

ss evokes a very contemporary yearning for spirituality . That he cannot sustain

 the tone of serene momentum that opens the film is perhaps inevitable ; once th

e seduction of the viewer is accomplished there 's a certain leveling-off of pas

sion . But the beginning of `` Little Buddha '' has moments so full of magic it 

's surprising how much of it is accomplished through simple humor . The Buddhist

 temple in Bhutan , where the film opens , is not the forbidding place of popula

r imagination . It is a center of learning , of warmth and of children instructe

d by Lama Norbu ( Ying Ruocheng ) , who invites questions and makes jokes . His 

beatific demeanor changes only after he gets a letter saying that the reincarnat

ed spirit of his late teacher , Lama Norje , has been located . In Seattle . `` 

Lama Norje had a great sense of humor , '' says Kenpo Tensin ( Sogyal Rinpoche )

 , one of the jolly monks who have determined that blond , Gameboy-playing Jesse

 Conrad ( Alex Wiesendanger ) has been chosen by Norje for his reappearance . Je

sse likes the idea , likes the gentle Lama Norbu , and gives signs that he may a

ctually be Lama Norje . But it 's no joke to his parents ( Bridget Fonda and Chr

is Isaak ) , who have made no provision in their yuppie life-plan for a Buddhist

 invasion . Where `` Little Buddha '' falters , and it does , lies in the castin

g . As Jesse 's fatherInvalid face , Dean , who takes Jesse to Bhutan , Isaak ha

s the unformed face and personality to make him truly American , and truly flat 

. Likewise Reeves , whose lighter-than-air screen presence is appropriate for th

e young , naive Prince Siddhartha , but who in the end doesn't provide anything 

very substantial . The ancient Indian sequences are full of miracles , outlandis

h visuals and ornate religion , but the modern world defines the film 's spiritu

al impact . Bertolucci says that godhead isn't about myth and trappings , but ab

out yearning as defined by the faith of monks , or perhaps the unfilled need of 

secular Americans . `` Little Buddha , '' in its gentle way , probes that cavity

 . Three stars . Invalid face

 Eddie Murphy has been telling interviewers , in no uncertain terms , that `` Be

verly Hills Cop III '' is not his comeback film . And he 's right . A strictly p

aint-by-numbers , action-adventure yarn , with little sense of humor and even le

ss sense of purpose , `` Beverly Hills Cop III '' effectively nullifies Murphy '

s main asset comedy in favor of making him another Sylvester Stallone . Which is

 not something we desperately need . At the same time , it defuses the whole dra

matic premise behind the first two `` Beverly Hills Cop '' movies ( the first of

 which was vastly superior to the others ) , which was Axel Foley as bureaucrati

c victim a streetwise Detroit detective , a cop out of water , defying the uptig

ht , rulebook-bound Beverly Hills police to fight the good fight . He was smarte

r than your average underdog . Now , he just seems rude . When Axel gets to Beve

rly Hills this time around , he 's chasing a gang of cop killers who eluded him 

in Detroit after an opening shootout that 's a good example of both false advert

ising the action 's never this hot again and director John Landis ' debauched wa

y with movie violence . Bullets and blood are sprayed with equal abandon , cars 

and humans are liberally riddled , and each slug ends its trajectory target with

 a fat , soft thud . Much like the jokes . The Secret Service doesn't want the g

ang caught ; they 're up to uncovering something much bigger , apparently , than

 the killing of Detroit cops . Axel is unmoved , not caring who or what he demol

ishes en route to getting what he wants . He 's like a cop with a multipicture d

eal . The pursuit takes him to WonderWorld , a Disneyland knockoff inspired by t

he Walt-like Uncle Dave ( Alan Young ) and under the de facto control of Ellis D

eWald ( Timothy Carhart ) , the ruthless killer Foley is chasing . That this one

 deliciously perverse aspect of `` BHC III '' is not exploited for anything clos

e to its subversive potential is symptomatic of the movie 's failings . Disney-f

acists vs. the state . It could have been great . But `` Beverly Hills Cop III '

' lumbers on its way to a predictable , and predictably violent , conclusion , w

ith Axel 's BH buddy Billy Rosewood ( Judge Reinhold ) consistently befuddled , 

Detective Flint ( Hector Elizondo ) trying to protect his post-retirement job at

 WonderWorld , Bronson Pinchot reprising the unpronounceable Serge , who 's now 

in the personal security business , and some shamelessly cheesy action sequences

 . Theresa Randle , as the WonderWorld worker sympathetic to Axel 's cause , is 

really the sole cast member worth watching . Whether `` BHC III '' signifies any

thing in terms of Murphy 's career is moot ; the actor hasn't had anywhere to co

me back from , not if you 're talking box office . Even when he 's turned out in

cendiary devices like `` Harlem Nights '' or `` Boomerang '' he 's made money . 

Artistically , of course , it 's another story . He hasn't really fulfilled his 

comedic potential since .. . well , maybe the original `` Beverly Hills Cop . ''

 But it clearly doesn't bother him . If Eddie Murphy felt he had anything to pro

ve , he wouldn't have done Part III of a movie series that had already run out o

f gas , wouldn't have hooked up with as lame a director as Landis , and certainl

y would have read Stephen de Souza 's script ( you don't think he actually read 

this script .. . ? )

 BRUSSELS , Belgium Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev declared Tuesday his 

country would join NATO 's Partnership for Peace but emphasized that the terms o

f Russia 's participation still need to be clarified . Resolving some of the rec

ent ambiguity about the Russian government 's relations with the Atlantic allian

ce , Grachev said after meeting with NATO defense ministers that Russia would de

finitely join the military-cooperation program , which is designed to create a n

ew security system for Europe with NATO as its foundation . `` Boris Yeltsin , o

ur president , has instructed me to make it clear that Russia will join the Part

nership for Peace program , '' Grachev said . `` We are not going to set forth a

ny conditions , '' he said , but he noted that `` these framework agreements do 

not fully set forth the principles and the forms of the cooperation . '' Grachev

 said Russia would like to sign a parallel document with the Western allies that

 spells out the nature of Russia 's collaboration and the defense of its vital i

nterests . He said he would provide details Wednesday after meeting again earlie

r that day with Defense Secretary William J. Perry and other NATO ministers . Gr

achev said that after the two documents were complete , he or Foreign Minister A

ndrei Kozyrev would be prepared to visit NATO headquarters `` to sign the two do

cuments , that is , the doctrine of Partnership for Peace and our document on th

e collaboration of Russia . '' During the 90-minute session , Grachev spent most

 of his time elaborating on Russia 's new military doctrine . He said Russia was

 not opposed to joining NATO in peacekeeping missions . Later , he told reporter

s that Russia would only resort to nuclear weapons when faced with aggression fr

om another nuclear power or one in coalition with an enemy . Senior administrati

on officials described the meeting as `` friendly and non-confrontational . '' T

hey said there was none of the bombast or harsh rhetoric that had been feared be

fore Grachev 's arrival at the headquarters of an alliance created 45 years ago 

to contain Soviet expansionism . But U.S. officials sounded a note of caution , 

saying they wanted to hear the specifics of the proposal Grachev promised to lay

 before the ministers Wednesday . For months , the Russians have sent confused s

ignals about their intentions of cooperating with NATO . After indicating early 

on that Moscow would join the Partnership for Peace , Yeltsin appeared to bow to

 demands from the military hierarchy that NATO must recognize Russia 's role as 

a major power in Europe by granting it special status . But NATO Deputy Secretar

y General Sergio Balanzino said after a meeting of the alliance 's defense minis

ters earlier in the day that there could be no question of drawing up a formal s

eparate agreement for the Russians . `` There will be no special protocol for Ru

ssia as a member of Partnership for Peace . All members must follow the same rul