There is one way to get around watching a film with an intimidating length and that is to believe in all your soul that it is only 90 minutes long when you click play. So when I click pause to go to the toilet and I see that the film is three hours long and I'm already 45 minutes in all I can do is stare at that number and say ''fucking hell''. At times I did believe that Ran might suffer from being overlong, in danger of meandering and losing me, but all-in-all I cannot begin to fault it. All the pieces of the puzzle fit.

Yeah we'll see. Despite the length that grits teeth and empties bladders the…

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
-Kyoami

King Lear in Feudal Japan by way of Akira Kurosawa. While some of Hollywood's biggest directors were looking at Kurosawa for inspiration he was looking at Shakespeare for his. (note: the story is also combined with a samurai legend).

Widely considered Kurosawa's last masterpiece, I can't argue, mainly because I haven't seen his last three films (yet) but I can't imagine them surpassing this one with all due respect to the master. How appropriate is it that his last great film is based on samurai legend with a character based on King Lear at this stage in his life?

Watching the film knowing it's background also gives it a special…

I've never seen so much blood come out of one woman's neck.

And I've never seen a more perfect adaptation of the Shakespeare story "King Lear." In fact I think this was the best Shakespeare adaptation I've seen period.

Ran seemed to be a lot of firsts for me. Shamefully, it just so happened to be my first FULL Akira Kurosawa film. (I had only seen bits and pieces of Seven Samurai) better late than never right?

"King Lear" was written about 400 years ago. This means that people have had 400 years to dissect it and pick apart what it means. I'm not going to shove 400 years of redundancy down your throat about what the story means. Just…

Ran is an epic masterpiece to be sure, but I only just liked it. I didn't love it, I wasn't floored, I wasn't blown away. I should have loved this, though! This is a story about betrayal, loyalty, respect, and madness. I'm a huge Shakespeare fan. I personally think that Shakespeare's original King Lear story of a King and his three daughters is much more compelling to me than Kurosawa's reimagining with three sons. The love triangles and betrayals of the original are kind of overlooked and glossed over here, where the focus is mostly on the father's madness and the epic battle scenes. There is no characterization whatsoever, in my opinion. It's as if individual personalities don't matter. All…

I haven't actually read King Lear (somehow high school English class skipped that one), and this is the first film I've seen by Kurosawa, but nevertheless I enjoyed this loose samurai-epic adaptation quite a bit more than I expected to from the first twenty or so minutes. To elaborate, at its best Ran is gorgeous -- all of the battle scenes are spectacular (even compared to some modern Hollywood films -- the action is certainly better shot than, say, Gladiator, and it was almost definitely an inspiration for the Lord of the Rings movies), the costumes and use of color in general are striking, and many of the still shots are composed like beautiful paintings (particularly the final shots!). But…

There is one way to get around watching a film with an intimidating length and that is to believe in all your soul that it is only 90 minutes long when you click play. So when I click pause to go to the toilet and I see that the film is three hours long and I'm already 45 minutes in all I can do is stare at that number and say ''fucking hell''. At times I did believe that Ran might suffer from being overlong, in danger of meandering and losing me, but all-in-all I cannot begin to fault it. All the pieces of the puzzle fit.

Yeah we'll see. Despite the length that grits teeth and empties bladders the…

(Day One of 30 Days, 30 countries challenge, obviously coming a little late, Japan)

I feel like it's hard to talk about anything Kurosawa because his legacy is so ingrained into film culture, and I've always felt that it was impossible to say anything negative about him without getting discredited outright. I'll admit I haven't seen many of his movies, in fact this is only my second, after Seven Samurai. This is a movie that has aged much better than Seven Samurai. As ahead of it's time as it was, Seven Samurai hasn't aged into a particularly watchable film for modern audiences, taken out of it's historical context. It's plot is about a simple as can be, and it's characters…