Five Star Movie: Ran

In 1985 at age 75 Akira Kurasawa released his last great movie Ran. In many ways Ran is his greatest movie, in part because I believe he took on multiple challenges where movie makers often fail.

The screenplay is an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. Adaptations are very difficult to write and when you start playing around with one of Shakespeare's classics like King Lear, you have really upped the ante on expectations. More than a director Kurosawa was also a screen writer and gets lead credit for this screenplay. In this case the adaptation is brilliant. There are no wasted words in this movie, no wasted scenes, but beyond that the words here are crisp and clean and to the point, and like Shakespeare the screenplay throws big thoughts at us in simple packages and they work. Time and again they work.

Also Kurosawa was trying to direct a large, vast story with huge battle scenes and a multi-layered story. As a director he pulls this off effortlessly. We move from the quiet scenes between husband and wife plotting to huge battles, battles like you've never seen on film before, with seemingly little effort from Kurosawa. This is very very hard to do as a director. You are taking your audience on a journey of both quiet and loud and so often the director more than the audience seems to get lost in such efforts.

These things would be enough to make this a brilliant movie, but this is one of the best directed movies I've ever seen. Some of the visuals here are just mind blowing and it adds a layer to this movie which makes it a must see.

It is currently available for streaming on Netflix and so if you've never seen it and you have access to Netflix streaming I highly recommend it.