# 144 Ran (1985)

Being a movie critic is a tough job. Sometimes you don't like some of the highly appraised movies, and you have to give an honest review without looking like a complete idiot.

Ran is Kurosawa's fourth movie that made it on IMDb Top 250 list, and the only one of these four that is made in color. It's about a warlord who decides to devide his kingdom between his three sons, which eventually leads to war between the brothers and drives their father insane. Ran can be translated as "chaos", and this is exactly what this movie is.

The pacing is very slow, the scenes with the insane warlord and his jester are so long, and there's so many of them that it starts to get irritating. The dialogues aren't nearly as good as in Yojimbo, and sound really unnatural to me. And I guess I was expecting some kind of an intellectual twist in the story, but the plot is very simple. The acting, in my opinion, was too theatrical. The actor credited as "Peter", who played the jester, was good, but still I didn't feel any sympathy for him, or any other of the characters.

It was a great action film for 1985, with all the battle scenes, which by guess take about eighty percent of the movie's running time, but it has aged so much over the years, that I found myself unable to become engaged in it. The most spectracular scene of this film was probably the one in which the old man calmly sits in the castle tower while it goes up in flames. Unfortunately there weren't many close-ups in this film, for some reason Kurosawa keeps shooting his characters from a distance. The ending was a bit surprising, but not enough to change my perception on the movie.

Favotire quote: "Man is born crying. When he has cried enough, he dies".
Interesting fact: The story was inspired by samurai legends, but also draws on William Shakespeare's "King Lear" as well.