This is my first "free" weekend in a little while, so I decided to be a lazy bastard and fire up some DVDs from the Criterion Collection. Here's what I thought about the first three... (Potential spoilers abound, but I only talk about the ending of the third film) Film #1 RAN (Japan, 1985) This is director Akira Kurosawa's masterful retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear set in feudal Japan. Old king Hidetora of the House of Ichimonji disowns his one true son, Saburo, and divides his kingdom between his scheming other two sons, Jiro and Taro, who promptly dishonor and turn out their father. Hidetora wanders the land with his insightful fool, Kyoami, and is made to see through several episodes just how terrible a king and father he has been. Jiro, with the bigger kingdom, is assassinated by one of Taro's henchmen, forcing Lady Kaede (Jiro's wife) to seek an alliance and marriage with Taro. Having her own grudge against the Ichimonji family, she skillfully manipulates the situation into bringing disaster down on the once noble house. Battles ensue and castles burn (one in a spectacular sequence) and Saburo tries to rescue his wandering father. But is it too late? It has a plot from Shakespeare, Kurosawa's wondrous martial pageantry, and armies of real-live (i.e., non-CGI) soldiers and horses facing off. Lady Kaede is one of my all-time favorite movie villains; at several points in the film, the viewer is left with little to say about her other than "That bitch!" It is also a commentary on humankind's endless propensity to kill, conquer, and destroy; the last few shots in the film may sum up the human condition better than words ever could. If you have not seen this one, do so immediately! This is one fantastic movie: 9/10. Film #2 THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM (Germany, 1975) This film is an adaptation of Heinrich Böll's novel which was motivated by real-life events in Germany in the early 70s. Katharina Blum is a decent, industrious young woman living in Cologne who chances to meet and spend a romantic evening with a handsome young man called Ludwig (an impossibly young Jürgen Prochnow), who, unbenkownst to her, is wanted by the law for...something, but it ain't good. After her arrest and interrogation over her encounter with the man, a sensationalist press, politically sympathetic with the police and perfectly open to a quid pro quo or two, dredges up all the dirt it can find (and makes up what it can't!) in order to drag's poor Ms. Blum's good name through the mud. But Katharina does know more than she's telling. Can she get through this nightmare with her honor and decency intact? Another terrific film and, because of its subject matter--terrorism, sensationalist press, security vs. civil rights--it feels very recent. This is very definitely a one-sided piece from Nobel Prize-winning author Böll (who had his own ax to grind with Germany's Bild newspaper and its owner, Axel Springer) but, whatever the validity of his stance on the German press of the 1970s, the story works very well today. Highly recommended: 8/10. Film #3 FAT GIRL (France, 2001) This one spends 95% of its time setting the viewer up for one thing, and then slams the viewer with an ending that comes out of nowhere like a Mack truck with no brakes. Two daughters of a middle class French family on vacation in the south of France--one, a gorgeous 15-year old nymph named Elena, the other, her overweight 13-year-old sister Anaïs--meet a handsome Italian college boy, Fernando. Elena and Fernando hit it off and are soon secretly meeting in the girls' bedroom in the wee hours of the morning, performing the time-honored seduction ritual wherein the boy tries to convince the girl it's about love, and the girl allows herself to believe him. Witnessing this, the younger Anaïs, sees the situation more clearly: love is a word we use to sentimentalize the act of two people getting their freak on. To everyone's embarrassment, the affair is soon discovered and the girls are driven back to Paris by their mother. The editing, music, and content of the drive do a wonderful job of building suspense for...something. You don't know what, but you know there's something coming. Okay, that's the first 95% of the movie. Until this point, it's a well-executed character piece about coming of age. So, the three women (the two daughters and the mother) are in the car headed back to Paris and they pull into a roadside rest stop to get some sleep... ...when some thug appears, smashes the windshield of the car with an ax, kills the older daughter by striking her in the head with the ax, strangles the mother, and then takes the 13-year-old into the nearby woods and rapes her. As you watch, you expect this to be some kind of dream sequence, the manifestation of young Anaïs' notions of the complete de-romanticizing of sex...but no. The final shot is the police on scene and Anaïs being taken away...denying that she's been raped. FIN (The End). This is what drives Americans nuts about European movies--French movies in particular. Just what the fuck is this supposed to mean? I'm inclined to think that this is somehow the logical fulfillment of young Anaïs' notion of completely de-romanticized sex. Divested of its mythology, sex is simply two animals doing what animals do. Perhaps this is a cautionary tale that warns us not to remove the mythology from sex that allows us to see it as something higher and more civilized than it actually is. Perhaps we need this mythology. I'm not sure how to rate this one. How do I score a film that so offends my aesthetic expectations on one hand but makes me truly ponder its meaning on the other? I'm not sure I recommend this one unless you want to consider it for yourself. 7/10.
Y'know, I could have sworn I had seen a French film with the same plot as Fat Girl a couple years back...but it certainly didn't have that ending. Not in the slightest. Though I seem to recall the characters being older. Oh well.
Ooof. But for this one, it should be "I ran back to get another ticket to see it again." Incidentally, Ran (pronounced like the name "Ron") is Japanese for "chaos."
Some images from Ran... The beginning: Hidetora decides to split his kingdom among his sons... King Hidetora, his castle burning around him... Turned on by two of his sons, his samurai protectors slain, his castle on fire, and now himself descending into madness, Hidetora wanders into the wilderness (and, yes, that is a full-sized castle set burning behind him; Kurosawa had to get this in ONE take before the $1.5 million set burned down.)... The treacherous Lady Kaede...
Well, yes...Million Dollar Baby is your classic underdog boxing story that suddenly becomes a movie-of-the-week on euthanasia...but at least it was understandable!
I usually ponder that shit for a good couple hours or so, and then finally conclude, as I always do "tsht, fuckin' french. ".
Love ran. Loved every Kurosawa I've seen, but I haven't seen them all. I have Criterion laserdiscs of Ran, 7 Samurai, Roshomon and Yojimbo (Yo! Jimbo!), and I recently got his "Dreams" collection on DVD. Phenominal stuff!
