Hacker Cinema
Ran
乱
1985 · Film · 160 min
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Shakespeare's King Lear is reimagined as a singular historical epic set in sixteenth-century Japan where an aging warlord divides his kingdom between his three sons.
11 positive1 negative9 neutralfrom 21 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
24 comments on Hacker News
Ran is such a good movie to watch in a theatre. I saw Rashomon for the first time in a theatre and it was a life-altering experience
I regularly go to a nearby cinema that also shows older movies. Watching a movie like "Ran" (Akira Kurosawa) in a restored 4k version on a big screen is quite an experience. (Tickets are 10€ btw.) Often I go with a friend, but occasionally I also go alone. There's something about spending 2 or 3 hours in a dark room entirely focussing on a piece of art.
I made a film called "Searching For Kurosawa". This short documentary chronicles the story of Kawamura, a man who worked with legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa on the set of his opus "Ran". Kawamura was working in the BTS crew, but his footage got confiscated. It took almost 40 years to recover the footage and present that as his feature film.
My film got screened at the Academy Award-qualifying Bali International Film Festival and the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in the past month. It will be screening next month in New York City at the Asian American International Film Festival.
Well, he's wrong, and that's why there are so few "modern English" productions put on. And also why Shakespeare plays in the original language continue to live. When you see it performed live, you still get the gist.
The language is still beautiful. That's the point. More to the point, the audiences would not increase at all if they were translated into modern terms.
On the other hand, no one in the theater minds if you adapt the plot into something else entirely.
Ran (King Lear)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089881/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_3_nm_5_in_0_q_ran
10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147800/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Ran is an incredible film, IMHO. However, for these purposes, it doesn't fit what Nestflix is looking for: It's inspired by King Lear and follows some of the plot, but the plot also differs in many ways, the scenes and characters differ in many ways, and there's not one line of the Shakespeare play in it.
Ran is not only highly regarded in Kurosawa's output, it regularly pops up on lists of greatest films of all time.
When people speak of Kurosawa's weaker films, they generally mean Dodeskaden and Scandal, and then perhaps lesser-known efforts like The Quiet Duel and Derzu Uzala.
"samurai" movies:
- Seven Samurai
- Rashomon
- Ran
- Throne of Blood
- Kagemusha
non-samurai:
- High and Low
- Ikiru
I would say that the essentials are Seven Samurai, High and Low, Rashomon.
If anyone is interested in a retelling of King Lear as a samurai film, Akira Kurosawa has an interesting take on it in the movie Ran.
You've resurrected a memory in me...
KOSMO.com
-
Back in ~1999 there was a site called KOSMO.com, and, in San Francisco it was basically "doordash" and sought to employ a ton of urban bicycle delivery folks. I bought my first on-line delivery from KOSMO and it was delivered to me by bike messenger within an hour. That thing was the movie DVD "RAN" by Kirosawa....
so shorlty after this, I was on a flight back east and was talking with a guy sitting next to me, and we were talking about KOSMO, and I said to him "You know what would be great, would be a heat-map of restaraunts that are within my radi of travel modes (like whats within a five minute walk and is indian food"
I described this whole model I wanted from these new ways to deliver, order, pay....
Turned out the guy sitting next to me was one of the founders of KOSMO.com.....
--
They went under pretty quick and never developed tech for "whats near me now", so that sucks.
and to this day, with maps.FAANG everything and online order/delivery service Unicorns, I still dont have the perfect "map of shit thats near me as a heat map, based on what I am looking for and my mode of either transport/delivery"
Maps are really good, but they are still simply "maps"
I'd like a 'sentiment' layer on top of maps.
---
An example would be:
Show me the neighborhood [indian/mexican/whatever] restaurant, but show me traffic to and from, based on the radius of its customer-base
So basically you can see how many people are flocking to a place.
Ran is absolute feast for the eyes. I've never been so absorbed by a film as the first time I watched it. Just the whole openings sequence with boar hunt is instantly mesmerizing. And the fall of the castle at the end was just was electrifying.
You are a scholar, sir.
I ran the Google Cinema Club for 10 years, and I held up the flag for films like this. I'd rather show a good movie with lousy attendance than a shit movie that everyone likes.
I'm embarrassed to admit we only showed Wild Strawberries out of all those (many other Kurosawa flicks, though). Ran was just too long for a movie that started at 7:00 pm, while people had a last shuttle to catch.
A few other "greatest" scenes in cinema:
* Isak's vision of his family picnicking at the end of Wild Strawberries (1957), where a man finds peace in his journey through the memories of his life
* Hidetora walking out his burning castle in Ran (1985) amid a battle amid his two eldest sons for supremacy, his plan to divide his kingdom among his three children having come to a disastrous end - a man realizing his children (and humanity in general) are more horrible than his naive dreams of unity could sustain.
* Two scenes in The Cranes Are Flying (1957): a montage of Veronika's beloved dying in battle (he falls as his soul seems to ascend bc the camera angle) while she goes about her life; Veronika finding out Boris is dead for sure at the train station, giving the flowers intended for Boris to the returning men and their families, and then she sees the cranes above Moscow - hope and renewal.
* In I am Cuba (1964): a martyred revolutionary, a student, is carried through Havana as the whole city stops what they're doing to honor him, solemnly, cigar-factory workers and all.
* In Andrei Rublev (1966), there's an extended sequence where a bellmaker's young son agrees to pour a bell for a local lord. You see the entire process of making the mould and pouring the metal. It has a town-fair atmosphere. But at the end, there's tremendous pressure on the young bellmaker to have the bell ring properly and have no cracks. And it does. The protagonist, the lapsed monk Andrei Rublev, regains his faith, seeing the result of the young bellmaker's hope. (I've shared this a few times on this website.)
* At the end of L'Ecclise (1962), the two lovers decide to meet the next day but they don't. Instead, we see thirty shots of the empty city - a devastating way to get to the heart of loneliness and lack of connection in modern life.
After a decade of streaming movies, I started buying Blu-Rays again last year.
The last straw was trying to watch Kurosawa's "Ran". The supposedly 4K remaster available on Amazon Prime Video is criminally badly encoded. During the raid on the castle, you literally can't see the smoke because macroblocks are popping so hard on every keyframe.
The Blu-Ray is pristine and nobody can take it away from me. With streaming services, you pay for movies but you never know what quality they actually deliver on a given day. These are public corporations trying to deliver shareholder returns in what has become an environment of sinking stock prices, so if they can save on bandwidth costs by making the movie look a bit worse, they'll probably do it at some point -- and then again next quarter.
There's a whole bunch of his films I'd put squarely in my all-time list. Ikiru, Ran, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, High and Low, Dersu Uzala, Rashomon. It's one masterpiece after another. Try watching Seven Samurai and Ikiru back to back to really appreciate the genius of Takeshi Shimura as an actor.
Yes a friend of mine said exactly the same thing and sent me a torrented copy of The Dreamers. I looked awful. So bad I ordered the dvd. Which had some of its own issues with quality I’ll admit, but at least it wasn’t full of digital compression artifacts. I know not everything is like this but my experience with torrents has yielded a lot of varying quality problems. And these movies are not very esoteric they are made by much lauded directors. The fact that they are out of print means there is no higher quality rip to speak of. It’s why I’m particularly am a big fan of Criterion because they do do this work (such as a 4K restoration of Ran, beautiful!). That work requires money. It will take happen often we disregard these issues because we can get something close faster for free. With books of course this is mostly a non issue so I’ll give you that (aside from good and bad translations or edits. Dostoevsky is a good example. I believe Wallace once asked what does it mean “to fly at” and why would you translate the Russian to somethings so unreasonable.)
However the overall point was that I made a real flesh and blood friend in a physical place which is how I came to know these things to begin with. And otherwise have never heard certain movies ever mentioned and wouldn’t know about them at all.
14 out of 34 of the writers in that list are from places other than US/UK [1]. Even the included works by US/UK authors like Shakespeare and Orwell and Huxley aren't merely Anglophone culture - I'd argue they're a part of human culture. Are films by Kurosawa like Ran (King Lear) and Throne of Blood (Macbeth) any less Japanese because he was inspired by Shakespeare? I'd argue not.
Could they have made a better list? Certainly, and perhaps even they would acknowledge it. Of course we can nitpick - I agree with almost none of the selections related to software. But I think "done" is better than "perfect".
[1] - Murasaki Shikibu (Japan), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russia), Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Salman Rushdie (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Umberto Eco (Italy), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Roberto Bolaño (Chile), Stanislaw Lem (Poland), Jung Chang (China)
Agreed about his early black-and-white work, but I'm also familiar enough with his masterful use of color in films like "Ran" and "Kagemusha" that this doesn't surprise me. Kurosawa really was a genius.
The YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting has an entire episode dedicated to Kurosawa's use of motion in his films. It's fascinating. I have to say that frames from even his earlier films look like paintings to me.
I am very confused trying to check on these movies. They show up in search results. I click on them. They redirect me to dvd.netflix.com and suggest that I get a subscription. I don't want to sign up. I want to know if your service offers them or not. Nonetheless, maybe they'll help you?
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Walking-Tall/60034554
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Gaslight/70074384
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Beach-Blanket-Bingo-How-to-Stuff-a-Wild-Bikini/70103186
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Return-of-the-Dragon/60020726
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Ran/60027429
this film is pretty great. i got it on video from a catalogue in the 90s (heard of it because one of the stars was in kurosawa's "ran").
if you like this, you would probably like shuuji terayama (of emperor tomato ketchup fame), those his work isn't the easiest to get in the USA outside of an academic context.
more available is nagisa oshima, a lot of whose work is on the excellent streaming service filmstruck, but it's a bit headier than bara no soretsu.
Interestingly, my sense has been that Netflix's recommendation engine does a poorer job now than it did 10 years ago. I always assumed that it was because they used to use fairly straightforward collaborative filtering, and now they seem to be heavily focused on looking for stuff that's somehow cosmetically similar to other stuff I've watched.
So, like, instead of saying, "You liked Nosferatu? Well, other people who liked Nosferatu also liked Ran, so let's suggest that," it now goes, "Hey, that's a vampire movie! How about Blade?"
Thanks, and good to hear from someone else who appreciates Kurosawa.
It's hard to believe the similarities between Ran and King Lear are coincidence. It's not just the plot but many elements of the story, too. Also, Kurosawa based other films on Shakespeare plays.
Wikipedia, FWIW, says he started with a Japanese story and incorporated King Lear "after he had started pre-planning".
This was actually the plot of Ran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ran_%28film%29). The lord retires and divides his territory amongst his sons, but retains his title. His sons resent that he carries himself as lord even after they have inherited the land and conflict ensues. It's an absolutely enthralling and gorgeous film.
Strange. My first reaction is that the auto-complete was so bad that it, alone, would keep me from ever returning. I typed in "Ran" (the last film I saw), and then I had to click a tiny down-arrow about 25 times, and the down-arrow jumps around as you go. What takes "3 letters + return + click" on IMDB, took "3 letters + 25 precise clicks + return" on Nanocrowd. Autocomplete is usually an optional assist; here, it's more like a mandatory in-place search system with awkward controls.
I would have left a note about this (and other issues), but their only feedback mechanisms seem to be email or logging in to Blogger.
It may be the coolest recommendation algorithm ever, but from these first two things I tried, the interface seems fairly high-overhead. You need to hook me before I'll go for high-overhead. You need to convince me that you're more valuable than, say, simply listing other films by the same director. For "Ran", Nanocrowd recommends "Rambo" -- 'nough said. :-)
I'll check some of these I haven't seen out. He's got a Hitchcock and Kurosawa film on there, and they're two of the finest directors of all time. Rashomon is actually one of my least favorite Kurosawa films, but it's still great - I just much more greatly like Ran (English: "Chaos", his best film), Ikiru ("Life", it drags towards the middle but the government council scene at the end is incredible), Kagemusha ("Shadow", wow what an incredible premise - really an overlooked masterpiece when looking at his career), and of course Seven Samurai. Then you've got Yojimbo which is an interesting story but kind of campy, and Rashomon which is a great piece of storytelling and a great piece of directing, but just isn't as satisfying of an experience as Ran, Ikiru, Kagemusha, or Seven Samurai. If I was recommending Kurosawa to a new viewer, I'd say watch them in that order, and then perhaps Rashomon.
I haven't seen all of Hitchcock's films, but it's something I've been meaning to do. The thing both of these directors (Kurosawa and Hitchcock) have in common - they're both absolutely obsessed with presentation. They don't waste a single scene in their movies. In their better films, Kurosawa and Hitchcock don't even waste a single shot - everything is perfectly constructed for a very specific reason. Really incredible experiences to watch them, and highly recommended for people who love movies, stories, or simply just art.