Jim Beaver wrote:
> I dearly love THRONE OF BLOOD, but I think you are
in a distinct minority of
> opinion regarding RAN. I daresay RAN is considered,
by most critics, to be
> one of the great films of all time, from any nation.
(It currently stands
> at #78 in the IMDb's Top 250 films of All Time list
-- not necessarily an
> intellectual signpost, but with an 8.4 out of 10
average viewer rating,
> clearly not what most viewers think of as a "hideous
mess.") I tend to
> prefer Kurosawa's films with Toshirô ©fune, but RAN
is, IMHO, staggeringly
> staged, beautiful beyond measure to look at, and
thematically clear as a
> bell.
>
> I think STRAY DOG could stand with almost any
American noir.
I have heard of people who have such a high opinion of "Ran,"
but I've never met one. No offense intended, but that's the
kind of movie that makes me think the whole world is
completely insane. Sometimes I can look at movies I don't
like and at least see the things in them that other people
like...but "Ran" has to me always been a bloated, overlong,
confused, shambling and almost absurdly garish mistake in the
filmography of a great film director. Generally, I think he
was pretty much headed toward senility by then...his
seventies stuff ain't so great, and everything after "Ran" is
for the birds ("Akira Kurosawa's Dreams", in particular,
always struck me as a sign that the body was willing but the
mind completely disabled.)
But everybody's got at least one movie like that...that the
whole world seems to
"get" but which remains utterly opaque to you. You think
maybe you underestimated the movie on first watching it--one
billion IMDB posters can't be wrong--and so you watch it
again and...yep...you were right the first time...definitely
hated that movie.
Also, like I said before, I am perhaps not the greatest
evaluator of the works of Akira Kurosawa. I think he's a
great director, but he's always been in my mind an American
who works in the Japanese film industry. "The Seven Samurai"
is a fine western (even if there are no sixguns), but
ultimately...I'd rather have a John Ford or a Howard Hawks
(or even an Anthony Mann) making my westerns.
Ozu and Mizoguchi have for me always been more
quintessentially "Japanese". Ozu made a few genre pictures,
juvenile-delinquent movies and a milquetoast yakuza pic or
two, but mostly he's a genre unto himself; and Mizoguchi did
make at least one great samurai film ("The 47 Ronin" is
swell, if overlong) but his main gig was whores and fallen
women. Neither man has the thumping guns-n-swords action
pulse that Kurosawa does, but nobody breaks my heart like
those two guys.
David Moran
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