Colin Marshall

The Colinments of Style: Ran review

This time round, we have the third and final user review of one of my favorite films of all human history. This particular reviewer takes on the (awesome) Criterion release of Akira Kurosawa's Ran:

Kurosawa's last undisputed masterpiece, "Ran" adapts "King Lear" (Shakespeare was Kurosawa's favorite writer) placing it during the 16th century in Japan. Like "Throne of Blood" (another Kurosawa classic that also adapts "Macbeth") "Ran" melds action with drama in a unique way that only Kurosawa was able to do. Sure there have been other directors that have made films about Japanese culture, Feudalism and the Samurai but none with the keen insight and profound glimpse into what makes a culture tick as well as Kurosawa.

Kurosawa had lost most of his collaborators prior to the shooting of "Ran". All of that informs the darkness and his identification for the main character. While Kurosawa freely borrowed from "King Lear", he also informed the film with many issues facing himself; he felt isolated from the Japanese filmmaking community and he was unappreciated in this late phase of his career having to scramble to get financing (frequently going overseas to get it). Kurosawa felt isolated and alone without his collaborators. The loss of his wife just prior to shooting meant that Kurosawa threw his raging emotions into "Ran" using the story of "Lear" as a means to examine his own personal situation.

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "AK" is included as part of the package on the second disc. That by itself would also make this worth repurchasing if you're in doubt about it. However, coupled with the terrific restoration and transfer done by Criterion here it makes this an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa's films. We also get an appreciation by director Sidney Lumet, an episode of Toho Masterworks on Kurosawa that's also quite good (although I prefer Marker's 74 minute documentary). "It is Wonderful to Create" focuses exclusively on "Ran" while Marker's documentary is a better overview of the director. Criterion has also used Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings to create sections of "Ran" as Kurosawa original saw it prior to actual production. Finally there's a new interview with lead actor Tasuya Kakadai. As usual Criterion has included an excellent booklet that includes a very good essay by film critic Michael Wilmington, a 1985 interview with Kurosawa about the making of the movie and a new interview with "Ran" composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe 2 disc edition makes the nonanamorphic previous edition look almost like a videotape by comparison in terms of the overall quality.

This is an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa. Kurosawa's last epic is, perhaps, his darkest and one of his most accomplished. The extras would make this worth purchasing by themselves but the beautiful, rich high definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" that has ever appeared on home video. I highly recommend this film.

* * *

The writer first launches straight into the acclaim, dropping in the Shakespeare angle along the way:

Kurosawa's last undisputed masterpiece, "Ran" adapts "King Lear" (Shakespeare was Kurosawa's favorite writer) placing it during the 16th century in Japan. Like "Throne of Blood" (another Kurosawa classic that also adapts "Macbeth") "Ran" melds action with drama in a unique way that only Kurosawa was able to do.

Though a bit vaguer and less informational than I'd like — it boils down to "Ran, which puts Shakespeare through the Kurosawa lens, is great" — these sentences can be tightened into respectability. We'll first 86 the parentheses and integrate what they contain more closely into the surrounding text. Then, in the interest of avoiding deadening repetitiveness, we'll dial down the appearances of the word "Kurosawa". A quick run through the de-passive-voicifier after that, and we get:

In his last undisputed masterpiece, Kurosawa transplants "King Lear" into 16th century Japan. Like "Throne of Blood", his classic "Macbeth" adaptation — Shakespeare was the filmmaker's favorite writer — "Ran" melds action and drama as only Kurosawa could.

A somewhat separate point about the nature of Kurosawa's skill follows. It's kind of a non sequitir — we'd expect a further point about that action-drama fusion — but hey, whatever:

Sure there have been other directors that have made films about Japanese culture, Feudalism and the Samurai but none with the keen insight and profound glimpse into what makes a culture tick as well as Kurosawa.

Plenty of editors advice heartily against leading with "sure," but this review establishes a conversational enough tone that we'll run with it, albeit with an added comma for pacing purposes; if you're going for conversational vocabulary, never forget conversational rhythm. But let's go ahead and cut, with great relish, "there have been other directors that" in favor of "other directors" and "profound glimpse" in favor of nothing. (I mean, "profound glimpse"? Seriously?) I love how much it slims down:

Sure, other directors have made films about Japanese culture, feudalism and the samurai, but none have Kurosawa's keen insight into what makes a culture tick.

Now for some production background:

Kurosawa had lost most of his collaborators prior to the shooting of "Ran". All of that informs the darkness and his identification for the main character.

This point comes off a bit psychologize-y for me, but we're here to polish writing, not, alas, thinking. Purging what excess verbiage we can and trusting readers to remember that Ran's the subject of the article, we're left with a sentence that nevertheless includes the uncomfortable term "informs." But I'm sure we'll live:

Kurosawa lost most of his usual collaborators prior to shooting, which informs the film's darkness and his identification with its protagonist.

An important point comes next, though you wouldn't know by how messily it's expressed:

While Kurosawa freely borrowed from "King Lear", he also informed the film with many issues facing himself; he felt isolated from the Japanese filmmaking community and he was unappreciated in this late phase of his career having to scramble to get financing (frequently going overseas to get it).

One "inform"? Tolerable. But two? Toss it. And if we're talking about a work and how the creator, uh, worked it, using the present tense comes off a lot smoother than trying to place the historical events of the filmmaking process and the film as "executed" in the viewer's experience on two different chronological planes. That's tricky in this sentence, though, because the writer discusses both Kurosawa's actions on Ran and how they draw on his experiences outside it. On close scrutiny, the end result kinda-sorta appears to suffer from mismatched tenses, but since the movie exists in the present, it reads fine:

While freely borrowing from "King Lear", he also imbues the film with challenges he faced himself: isolation from the Japanese filmmaking community, a lack of appreciation in the late phase of his career and having to scramble, frequently overseas, for financing.

The Passion of Akira, continued:

Kurosawa felt isolated and alone without his collaborators. The loss of his wife just prior to shooting meant that Kurosawa threw his raging emotions into "Ran" using the story of "Lear" as a means to examine his own personal situation.

Basically fine, if a tad herky-jerky. Let's perform a basic de-herking/de-jerking by combining these two sentences into one and excising all words not pulling their weight. We've already established the absence of Kurosawa's collaborators, so no need to do it again. We've already established that the piece is about Ran, so no need to deliberately re-indicate it. "Isolated" isn't really necessary if we already have "alone", it's obvious that "his" situation would be "personal", we know King Lear is a story, etc. The revision, even if it still includes the clunky emotion-throwing image, has at least substantially shrunk:

Compounding Kurosawa's aloneness, the loss of his wife just prior to shooting made him throw raging emotions into the film, using "Lear" to examine his own situation.

Seeing as I'm on record as an A.K. fan — and one of Marker in general — I could hardly disagree with the following:

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "AK" is included as part of the package on the second disc. That by itself would also make this worth repurchasing if you're in doubt about it. However, coupled with the terrific restoration and transfer done by Criterion here it makes this an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa's films.

Good baby Jesus that's bloated. We should write this as no more than a single sentence, one about A.K. and how it adds sufficient value by itself to make Ran worth buying twice. (Note: the non-Criterion release truly sucks, so it'd be worth it anyway.) Perhaps we don't even need to state directly that the DVD includes Marker's documentary — why else would we bring it up? — but we'll play it safe today:

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "A.K.", included as part of the package on the second disc, itself merits a repurchase of the movie.

The writer continues on the subject of extras, of which there, indeed, are some:

We also get an appreciation by director Sidney Lumet, an episode of Toho Masterworks on Kurosawa that's also quite good (although I prefer Marker's 74 minute documentary). "It is Wonderful to Create" focuses exclusively on "Ran" while Marker's documentary is a better overview of the director.

These sentences comprise mostly a list of facts; it's not far from the "extra features" bullet-pointery on the back of DVD boxes. Let's keep this a statement about what we get with the Criterion edition — mostly because I can't think of a better angle off the top of my head — but perform some flow-facilitating rearrangement. We'll cut the parentheses, predictably, but note that we'll also — and this is a rare move — insert another parenthetical statement, since the writer's remark about A.K. doesn't quite fit anywhere into the existing text:

We also get an appreciation by Sidney Lumet, an episode of "Toho Masterworks" on Kurosawa — good, though I prefer Marker's documentary — and "It is Wonderful to Create", which focuses exclusively on "Ran". ("A.K." provides a better overview of the director.)

Here come the last feature details. Though always conscientious about what to filter out, Criterion neverthess packs 'em in:

Criterion has also used Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings to create sections of "Ran" as Kurosawa original saw it prior to actual production. Finally there's a new interview with lead actor Tasuya Kakadai.

First and foremost, though this has nothing to do with prose style: the guy's named Tatsuya Nakadai. He's also not, like, some obscure historical footnote on whom nobody would think to check. C'mon now. Other than that, I can't complain about too much here other than inelegance. A little rearrangement, a comma here and there, and we're solid:

Using Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings, Criterion also creates sequences as Kurosawa envisioned them prior to production. Finally, there's a new interview with lead actor Tasuya Nakadai.

On-disc features aside, we mustn't forget the physical niceties — the writer doesn't, in any case:

As usual Criterion has included an excellent booklet that includes a very good essay by film critic Michael Wilmington, a 1985 interview with Kurosawa about the making of the movie and a new interview with "Ran" composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe 2 disc edition makes the nonanamorphic previous edition look almost like a videotape by comparison in terms of the overall quality.

Ooh, the VHS comparison — burn.

"Very good" carries so little meaning that it's best used (a) ironically or (b) not at all. The writer says much in these sentences that doesn't quite merit saying: Kurosawa's interview being "about the making of the movie" (doi), Toru Takemitsu being the "'Ran' composer", that sort of thing. And we'll cut the year of the Kurosawa interview, since the writer hasn't produced it for the Takemitsu one, and simply consider the both of them as a pair of interviews. I'd recommend strongly against ever remarking on something's "overall quality," but especially when you can instead compose a sentence about the better item winning the comparison. (And no, you don't need to indicate that the comparison is a comparison.) The lines we wind up with retain a whiff of clunk, but compared to how they used to read, I can deal:

As usual, Criterion includes an excellent booklet with an essay by critic Michael Wilmington and interviews with Kurosawa and composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe two-disc edition makes the previous, non-anamorphic release look like a VHS tape.

Here's the big thumb-up finish:

This is an essential purchase for fans of Kurosawa. Kurosawa's last epic is, perhaps, his darkest and one of his most accomplished. The extras would make this worth purchasing by themselves but the beautiful, rich high definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" that has ever appeared on home video. I highly recommend this film.

PROTIP: to end a piece strong, don't go on about what stuff is, and position your qualifiers so that they muddy as small a section of the water as possible. Though I first assumed fixing those problems would amount to little more than a quick re-jig, it turns out we'll have to perform some real word surgery; seeing off those "is" statements necessitates a near-complete restructure. We'll turn these four sentences about the purchase, the film, the extras, the transfer and the recommentation into one about the disc's most notable qualities. We can guiltlessly bin "I highly recommend this film," which by this point goes without stating. The writer also seems to have forgotten the "last undisputed masterpiece" designation from the beginning, so we'll cut the redundant "last" here too. Arriving at the end rebuild takes some trickery, but I think it comes out both more striking and much clearer:

An essential for the director's fans, the extras alone on Kurosawa's most accomplished and perhaps darkest epic repay purchase, but its rich, high-definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" ever to appear on home video.

Here's the entire review, reassembled:

In his last undisputed masterpiece, Kurosawa transplants "King Lear" into 16th century Japan. Like "Throne of Blood", his classic "Macbeth" adaptation — Shakespeare was the filmmaker's favorite writer — "Ran" melds action and drama as only Kurosawa could. Sure, other directors have made films about Japanese culture, feudalism and the samurai, but none have Kurosawa's keen insight into what makes a culture tick.

Kurosawa lost most of his usual collaborators prior to shooting, which informs the film's darkness and his identification with its protagonist. While freely borrowing from "King Lear", he also imbues the film with challenges he faced himself: isolation from the Japanese filmmaking community, a lack of appreciation in the late phase of his career and having to scramble, frequently overseas, for financing. Compounding Kurosawa's aloneness, the loss of his wife just prior to shooting made him throw raging emotions into the film, using "Lear" to examine his own situation.

Chris Marker's marvelous documentary "AK", included as part of the package on the second disc, itself merits a repurchase of the movie. We also get an appreciation by Sidney Lumet, an episode of "Toho Masterworks" on Kurosawa — good, though I prefer Marker's documentary — and "It is Wonderful to Create", which focuses exclusively on "Ran". ("AK" provides a better overview of the director.) Using Kurosawa's original sketches and paintings, Criterion also creates sequences as Kurosawa envisioned them prior to production. Finally, there's a new interview with lead actor Tatsuya Nakadai. As usual, Criterion includes an excellent booklet with an essay by critic Michael Wilmington and interviews with Kurosawa and composer Toru Takemitsu. This deluxe two-disc edition makes the previous, non-anamorphic release look like a VHS tape.

An essential for the director's fans, the extras alone on Kurosawa's last, most accomplished and perhaps darkest epic repay purchase, but its rich, high-definition transfer makes this the best version of "Ran" ever to appear on home video.

You should send along any and all 100-700-word samples of prose with which I can dick around to colinjmarshall at gmail. These should preferably not include the author's name or any source information.

Choice thoughts: Huell Howser

Though Huell Howser is an easy (and frequent) target for ridicule, I've got nothing but admiration for his production sensibility:

"We have two agendas," he told me. "One is to specifically show someone China Camp State Park or to talk to the guys who paint the Golden Gate Bridge. But the broader purpose is to open up the door for people to have their own adventures. Let's explore our neighborhood, let's look in our own backyard, let's go down to Koreatown and buy some kimchee. We won't do a story on what it's like to spend the night in a $10,000 hotel suite. We do things to put the spotlight on the fact that every single person we meet potentially has a great story to share. Can I repair a car? No. Can I cook a meal? No. Can I paint a picture? No. Can I talk with people? Can I help them tell their stories? Absolutely."

It is all very lo-fi and DIY. "I don't have an agent," said Howser, 58. "I don't have a manager, I don't have a press agent, I don't have a wardrobe guy, a makeup guy, a parking space, a dressing room. It's basically me and a cameraman and an editor and a couple of guys in the office. I can go out between now and noon and do a full 30-minute show just talking to people on the street and have it on the air tonight. It's an economic model that's a production model, but it's a model that I believe in philosophically as far as what the viewer should see."

[ ... ]

[It's] long takes, few edits, as much unaffected experience as possible. "It's not unusual for us to have 6-, 8-, 9-, 12-minute sections, just edited head to tail," he said. "I did an interview with David Hockney where he showed me around his studio that didn't have any edits. And we always shoot wide because I want the viewer to see what you would see with your eyes if you were there, so when I'm sitting here talking with you" — meaning me, across the table — "I see you but I also see the bush over your shoulder. I see the Brinks trucks behind you. That's life."

Cheap, simple, quick and full of life; not terribly far from Robert Fripp's endorsement of music made by "small, highly mobile, independent and intelligent units." The question is less "What other ventures can this model be used for?" than "What other ventures can't this model be used for?" For those interested, by the by, Howser's show California's Gold also goes out as a video podcast.

Michael Palin's New Europe (Michael Palin et al., 2007)

In his seventh world travel series for BBC Television, Monty Python alum Michael Palin and his time- and inadequate lavatory-tested crew visit the newest members of the European Union and their immediate neighbors. Along his curved way from Slovenia to Turkey to Kaliningrad to Germany with a load of stops in between, Palin has leeches applied to his chest, wears an unwieldy head wreath, pronounces words on Polish television, witnesses hairy men slathered in olive oil wrestle one another, checks out hideous Communist architecture, makes a sausage, not-quite-successfully attempts that wrist-intensive frying pan trick chefs do and hits a public bath.

* * *

Michael Palin came by my former neck of the woods in 2000 to promote the Hemingway Adventure, and seeing the lecture was, to that point in my life, one of the neat-o-est things ever. During the Q&A, he mentioned that, after completing each series, he vows to himself that he'll take no more of "these long trips," and of course he'd done the same post-Hemingway. Which was followed, two years later, by Sahara. Then Himalaya. And now New Europe. So, in other words, he'll be doing these shows all the way to the grave, though in his condition I imagine he'll live forever. That's fine by me, since Palin's Travels have long since been my favorite television of any kind; I have many memories of watching rapt at age seven as he made his way from, say, Pole to Pole, thinking, "This guy has the best job in the world!" (I didn't was unaware of Palin's beloved-comedy-troupe origins at the time — to me, he was the main guy from Ripping Yarns — though since I've never quite gotten with their material, his Python credentials are still essentially meaningless to me.)

The new series differs from its predecessors most noticeably in that Palin sticks chiefly to places more or less safely categorizable as part of the "developed world"; he never eats a can of "stewed chicken with bone" in a colonial-era dining car stalled on its tracks somewhere in the desert, for instance. He drinks from zero bowls of chewed leaves with tribeswoman saliva. He stays off dhows. Compared to where he's been, many of the New European places he visits are positively slick. This is fine by me — if I go journeying myself, it'll be to countries with U.S.-quality toilets or better — but perhaps certain hardcore fans of the Travels need to see more inconvenience.

But it's not all fun, games and a lack of Delhi Belly. From the very first, the program makes it clear that most of the states covered have only put a salami slice of temporal distance between themselves and living nightmares, whether those nightmares involve the Bosnian War, the caprice of any number of eccentric dictators, or, of course, The Big C. Communism's legacy casts an unsurprising shadow over a bunch of these nations, and its effects show up not just in their stringy economies but in the memories of everyone over the age of about forty. There's a lot of "Man, that sucked" sentiment, which I expected, since, y'know, the rise of communism was pretty much the worst thing. Not the worst ideology, not even the worst event — the worst thing. Forgive me if I come off like a cornfed, red-faced midcentury legistlator sputtering incoherently against the human wave of godless pinkos, but try to argue that I'm wrong. Know that if you pull one of those "the Soviet Union wasn't hell, it was just really dull" rationales, I will lump you with those who argue that "well, the Soviet Union wasn't real communism anyway." Not a group to be taken seriously.

Anyhow, what was kind of surprising was how young eastern Europeans would tell Palin about their parents' few fond memories of the Soviet era. "In the GDR, not everything was wrong," says one German of his parents' life, which couldn't have promised much more than a 800 square feet in a cement tower, a place on the Trabant waiting list and a jar of Spreewald pickles. They quickly clarify that they don't mean that they miss the government, but that they just miss the times they had under than government. And if you think about it, that stands to reason: alongside irony, nostalgia is one of the universe's most powerful forces. Even if you grew up under the thousand heels of a bureaucratic totalitarian monstrosity that itself was dominated by several other, even more grotesque, violent strata, you'll still be a kid, you'll still play hide-and-seek, you'll still come of age, you'll still meet those special somebodies, and thus you'll retain fond memories of those things, occur under brutal communist misrule though they may have. And you probably weren't even aware of that until later in life. So I guess it's only natural for older generations to have "fond memories of the Soviet era," unless their lives sucked for non-state-inflicted reasons too.

But what really did surprise me is what oldsters said — not guys and girls my age relaying their parents' stories, and not even those parents themselves, but actual old people around their 80s — when reflecting on their lives, the large majority of whose years were spent on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. One in particular articulated the core of what I hadn't expected: he believed that given just a few more years the Soviets could have pulled it together and, at long last, established real Communism, freedom, equality, people's democracy, dialectical materialism, grander monuments, etc. It slowly emerged over the course of the next several episodes that a lot of people, marooned in the vast wasteland of cabbage lines and stunted grayness, apparently thought Communism on its way. Did they assume all the Solzhenitsynesque nonesnse crushing them on a daily basis was just the due they had to pay to one day attain the socialist ideal? Alas, they were already living the socialist ideal, or at least the fullest possible instantiation of the socialist ideal in the material world. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

Palin's Travels have always been beautifully photographed — and the books of stills by Basil Pao are on a whole other, higher plane altogether — but New Europe looks and feels like the most polished of the bunch on several scales. It even moves more smoothly than its predecessors. If you've seen a single episode of any of Palin's Travels you know the format: Palin gets to a country, meets up with a local and gets led into some amusing and/or culturally revealing situation. Pause to think about production, and it's obvious that Palin isn't just disembarking from the boat or train or whatver, running across random fascinating, unusual people all on his lonesone and getting invited into their lives; sure, maybe some were found on the fly, but the vast, vast majority of the meetings were surely prearranged in fine-grained detail by the BBC.

And to be fair, Palin and co. aren't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. What the viewer sees is one middle-aged Englishman trotting from place to foreign place, mingling with the natives and participating in all manner of conversation, commerce and ritual. What the viewer does not see, but what couldn't very well be absent, are all the guys with the cameras, the microphones, the extra digital video cassettes or discs or drives or whatever, the director or directors, the assistant director or directors, the itinerary guy, the financial guy, the logistics guy, the grunts, the interns, the ghost of John Reith and, of course, the bond company stooge. (Let's not even go into how much luggage they all must have.) And of course, they're not just standing around shooting what Palin says and does, either: they're getting angles, coverage, multiple takes. They're on their own paddle boat while Palin's on his. They're individually micing everyone he speaks to. It sounds like a whole lot of... work.

I'm making it sound as if I've finally become fed up with the artifice of it all and am maybe about to kick Palin's Travel's to the curb, but no; I like the shows as much as ever. Maybe more. Some viewers might have a kneejerk negative reaction to slickness and orchestration, but c'mon — this is the best damn slickness and orchestration around. It's not slickness and orchestration in the name of banality; it's slickness and orchestration in the name of aesthetically awesome, information-packed entertainment. And who more appropriate than Palin to host it? The formula has been and remains near-perfect, so you won't hear me calling for a shake-up.