Word: ran
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...victory forged by the running of Craig James, who ran for 104 yards on 23 carries, the first 100-yd. game against the Raiders this year...
...Japan. And Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are here men called Taro, Jiro and Saburo. We are obviously far from the place of this tragic tale's mythic birth and noble retelling, and we are far from the inert reverence of the typical movie adaptation of a classic. Indeed, in Ran (which means "chaos" in Japanese) we venture into a territory where the very word adaptation distorts and diminishes both intention and accomplishment. For what Akira Kurosawa has done is to reimagine Lear in terms of his own philosophy, which blends strains of Western existentialism with a sort of elegiac Buddhism...
What he nourished there for the decade between writing and shooting Ran was a dream that inevitably obsesses (and generally defeats) most great filmmakers: the creation of a work that realizes cinema's unique capacity for the sweeping epic gesture. The problem in realizing what may be the movie's ideal form is to keep one's balance. Reach too far in one direction, and all you do is bring on the empty horses. Restrain the impulse, and you may only bring forth empty images, beautiful and static. It is on the ground that lies between melodrama and abstraction that...
...source of his triumph is his viewpoint. Great tragic figures generally demand close-ups as a divine right, so that the audience can read the play of noble emotions in their features. In Ran, that shot scarcely exists. Kurosawa's cameras (he usually covers each scene with three) are always pulled back into godlike positions, and they provide a new perspective on the rages and the ultimate madness of Tatsuya Nakadai's Lear figure. From above and beyond, we perceive him not as a great man falling but as a fragile, all too human stumbler. Distance lends an analogous irony...
...effect on people we cannot see from our normal positions as groundlings. But in lifting us to these heights, he has, miraculously, not distanced our emotions. Somehow, each figure in the vast canvas has a particular and touching life of his own. Kurosawa gives the last shots of Ran to one of these minor victims of great men's grand designs. A blind youth has lost the flute that was the sole consolation for his affliction and the painting of Buddha that was his talisman. Now he wanders to the edge of a precipice, oblivious of being poised unseeing between...