Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Ran!

Is this the most famous shot in cinéma history? It's pretty much this or Harold Lloyd hanging from that clock.

No doubt Akira Kurosawa is one of the canonical great filmmakers, universally respected for his 2,465 samurai movies, his disciplined camera movements, beauty-out-of-chaos mise-en-scène, and classical sense of tragedy. Yet his legacy in the west largely consists of fat neckbeards eagerly telling you Star Wars is based on his The Hidden Fortress, which is like if Michelangelo were mostly known for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after him. Fortunately, after ruining cinema with the runaway success of his Flash Gordon pastiche, George Lucas made some efforts to redeem himself by teaming up with his pal Francis Ford Coppola to fund Kurosawa's late-period epics, chief among them the master's adaptation of William Shakespeare's brilliantly edgy adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Lear.

The run-on sentences will get longer in direct proportion to the pedigree of the project under examination.

Geoffrey's ostensibly historical account of Lear followed the same basic plot as Shakespeare's extremely unfaithful adaptation in having the old king give away all his lands to his obviously evil daughters named after venereal diseases, while disowning his one good daughter for having an autism attack and failing to jump through the hoops of flattery he lays out for her. The difference is that Geoffrey's account has a happy ending, with the evil daughters vanquished and the king and his good daughter reconciled. Because he was the original edgy boi, Shakespeare completely changed the ending to make King Lear his greatest masterpiece; a bleak, harrowing tragedy almost devoid of hope; a caustic and curiously Machiavellian cautionary tale against ego, resentment, and the folly of squandering your power and birthright to appease smooth-talking social climbers who tell you what you want to hear over the bluntly honest autismos who'll tell you what you need to hear. Macbeth may be more Gothic, Hamlet more metaphysical, but King Lear is the one that hits you like a horse kick to the gut.

Most of this kino was filmed on the slopes of active volcanoes, and the bitter, ashy waste of the landscape pervades each frame like a miasma out of hell.

So what could even Kurosawa add to such a bona fide masterpiece? Naturally he set it in feudal Japan, and made the three daughters sons, proving race and ""gender"" swaps can be based, presumably to the confused soyrage of both sides of movie YouTube.

This summer, Nicki Minaj IS Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

But Kurosawa also muddies the waters to intriguing effect by conflating the Lear narrative with a story about IRL historical daimyō Mōri Motonari, who taught his sons that individually they were easily breakable sticks, but together they formed a mighty faggot.

Zoomies will be shocked to learn I stole that joke from The Simpsons.

In this telling of the tale, however, the "good" son, Saburo (who is not a type of car) throws a sperg fit at this obvious metaphor and forcibly snaps all three arrows round his knee. While Cordelia's awkward autistry in Shakespeare's version contained a harsh but ill-timed truth, Saburo's meltdown actually undermines the potential unity of the clan and thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in its own right, which adds a further layer of 40Kesque unforced-tragicomedy-of-errors to the drama. Moreover, while Shakespeare's Lear quite plausibly claims to be more sinned against than sinning, Kurosawa's Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) has clearly built up his dominion through bloody battle. The redemption he craves can only be attained through the unity of his sons ensuring what he's bought at the cost of his soul is a sustained peace. In this light the dissolution that befalls him damns him utterly. Like the boomers, like the ""greatest"" generation, he fails and betrays his own legacy. We're plumbing crushing, totally aphotic depths of tragedy here.

White westerners when they sense a drop of Twitter clout in the enthusiastic dispossession of their people.

The master also ""gender"" swaps another character from Shakespeare's Lear in the form of ascended bastard and master manipulator Edmund, here replaced by Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). A superficial reading indulged for ideological reasons by most critics makes her out to be le ebin reddit Complex Sympathetic Villain, since her beef with Hidetora is grounded in his earlier campaigns that claimed her family and ancestral castle.

Media literacy enjoyers when the horrendously evil antagonist has a traumatic backstory like every murderer and pedophile in real life.

Anyone actually familiar with Shakespeare and human psychology, however, understands that she's entirely in keeping with the Bard's presentation of his villains: Edmund and Shylock (who are blatantly Ol' Bill's favourites, since he gives both of them a thoroughly unwarranted redemption arc right at the end of their respective plays) both have self-serving rants in the form of soliloquies that explain their grievances not to convince the audience, but precisely to demonstrate how delusional their self-justifications are. Most people in modernity are so morally, culturally and intellectually debased that they actually mistake "Hath Not a Jew Eyes" and "Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards" as legit points, instead of the psychotic ravings of embittered narcissists. This misreading also explains everything about these people's engagement with contemporary politics. But Kurosawa surely understood the Bard's device, as he renders Kaede an almost supernaturally evil presence: only she and Hidetora use heavy Noh stylisation in their physical performances, rendering them archetypal.

Maybe this scene where she literally licks blood from Jiro's neck like a vampire should give you a clue.

It's the most important part of Shylock's soliloquy that's rarely quoted: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction" [emphasis mine (and Shakespeare's)]. In her pursuit of personal vengeance, Kaede destroys a kingdom and condemns thousands of lives, no doubt creating hundreds more Kaedes in turn. Kaede simps are the same BPD drones and soy orbiters who stanned the chick in Gone Girl when she went on her rant about men liking "the cool girl" over...BPD drones. Are you seeing where I'm going with this?

Soybeards will bore you with the standard take that this show was a heckin wholesome satire of heckin floofin boopin snootin toxic man-capitalismerino, but anyone with a triple-digit IQ and a human soul knows at a deeper (unconscious?) level, it was about men as the instruments of female proxy violence, and women as the instruments, in turn, of cluster B.

But finally we'd be remiss to overlook the sheer visual spectacle that Kurosawa brings to his and the Bard's magnum opus. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, but Kurosawa was able to use modern technology to paint on a much broader canvas, and his great work pops with the lurid colour of a fever nightmare, and teems with a cast of thousands Shakespeare might have pictured as he wrote, but never lived to see onscreen.

The colour-coded pāmitls alone are so cinematic all Japanese history might have been staged with just this film in mind.

Nor does our boi forsake the audio component of the format, with the famous silent battle, the sounds of screams and clashing weapons dipping out under an aching score, correctly lauded among the great sequences of the medium. How often does one of the greats of one art format remix and actually build on the best work of another? Ran is one of the essential films.

May we reach this point before it's too late.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tall in the Saddle!

TitS, for short.

Like noirs, slashers, rom-coms and found footage flicks, the western proliferated mainly because it was cheap to produce en masse, leading to an endless succession of mediocre entries with generic titles that could easily be mistaken one for another. The best entries often combined the setting with an unusual genre angle: the original 3:10 to Yuma largely foregoes action for suspense, and silent classic The Wind is an eerie psychological character study. Tall in the Saddle likewise takes a detour through murder mystery territory, though I barely noticed on the first viewing, because the plot is easily and cheerfully forgotten amid a rapid-fire procession of great scenes and oddball characters.

A little-acknowledged cliché is rendering exposition scenes more dramatic/hilarious by having characters eavesdrop from bushes.

John Wayne is Rocklin, an easygoing Chad who breezes into town courtesy of one of the great western geezers played by George "Gabby" Hayes. This cross-generational buddyship sets the affable tone for the picture, with Hayes' ham-and-cheese gurning counterpointing Wayne's laconic deadpan to consistently endearing effect.

A whole road trip movie with these two would have been perfectly acceptable.

Rocklin's pursuit of a property claim is complicated by murder and intrigue, and a classic male fantasy conceit in which a blonde Betty (Audrey Long) and brunette Veronica (Ella Raines) appear to vie for his affections.

Which way western man/porque no los dos?

The ubiquity of this dynamic must speak to some deeply Jungian archetype in the male psyche. Long embodies the demure tradwife, while Raines chews scenery as the gun-toting bad girl. Perhaps the key to the fantasy is that either way, you win.

>ywn be fatally shot by ella raines because she overheard a third-hand rumour that you caught her brother cheating at cards
Why even live?

In this series I aim to bring attention to forgotten gems as much as praise the classics, so I'm tending not to say too much to keep what may be your first viewing fresh. With Tall, however, there's not much I want to say other than to recommend it at the end of a long day's work. Each genre is a list of variations on a theme, and sometimes the variables of plot, setting, characters, cast, dialogue and so on just align the right way, like a pleasing passage of improvised jazz. Tall isn't the most ambitious or ""important"" western, but if time spent smiling like a fool while watching it is any sort of worthy metric, it's in a class of its own.

Sometimes you just want to see John Wayne ride horses, drawl folksily, and punch people.

It's often remarked upon how seldom movies scale the heights of Great Art, but it's less often recognised how seldom they're great entertainment. So many movies start out strong but lose their way and become maudlin as they drag out that late-act-two low-point, possibly out of misplaced fear that they'll be dismissed as frivolous without some po-faced moping making up the "drama" quota for srs art. Others make the even worse gaffe of trying to make some point or other about society, religion, politics or some other heady subject matter on which they're utterly unqualified to speak. Tall makes no point, makes no attempt to make a point, and even makes its melodramatic low-points somehow cheerful, more a well-judged ebb than an indulgent wallow.

We're even treated to some scenery porn at just the right moments, giving the mostly town-bound action physical space to breathe.

"But why single this assembly-line western out among all others?" you sound out, as though phonetically, brows knitted in simianesque concentration. Let me put it to you this way: if I can eat anywhere, I might gamble on some froo-froo haute cuisine, but if I want a burger, no amount of esoteric shit is going to satisfy me like a burger, and in that context, Tall is like a Five Guys in a world of Big Macs.

The Duke approves this message.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dark City!

Alex Proyas is best known for directing an entire capeshit movie like a Sisters of Mercy music video.

>i once mouthed the en-word while rapping along to the radio
ONE, NOTHING WRONG WITH ME

This is a shame because, presumably after he turned 15, he went on to direct this week's greatest movie of all time. Some have called it the patrician's Matrix. None have called it anything else, because that's what it is. Dark City dropped a clean year before the Wachowski Brothers' Ghost in the Shell-meets-Total Recall ripoff and is smarter, better and kinoer.

DESPITE ALL MY RAGE I AM STILL JUST A RAT IN A CAGE

WARNING: watch the director's cut. The studio mandated an expository voiceover in the original release that gives away too much of the plot. I mention this not because plot is important but because it plays better when you share the protagonist's fog of confusion about his predicament for much of the runtime.

We've all been there amirite?

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub in a scene that might incline you to suspect this will turn out like Saw or perhaps another Urban Legend. Fortunately he appears to have all of his kidneys, but suffers from memory trouble. Thus begins a journey of awakening that sees him flee from Nosferatuesque mystery men, cross paths with William Hurt's noir detective, Kiefer Sutherland's eccentric Igor and Jennifer Connelly's hypnotic nightclub singer, and discover secrets that will blow his mind.

Jennifer Connelly is in this movie :)

The titular metropolis through which this journey winds its idiosyncratic way blends the aesthetic influences of German Expressionism with the art deco retro of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s to create a wonderfully anachronistic space that seems familiar yet strange, remixed the way a dream is said to remix memories and events. It's really quite a lot like Gotham City in Tim Burton's Batman duology, if the atmospherics tended less toward operatic pulp camp and more toward sepia sadboicore - less Bat Out of Hell, more Deathconsciousness.

An overlooked component of movie magic is the architectural escapism by which we can spend time in achingly sad cityscapes devoid of litter and winos.

Sadly yet hilariously, the movie goes full retard toward the end and resolves in a comical anime battle, perhaps because Proyas still had a bit of Crow to flush out of his system. This left-field black mark on the project would be a killer for any less a kino but Dark City more or less recovers in its final denouement, which even salvages a little ambiguity and mystery that almost brings us full circle. It's an underrated balancing act to pull off, since too many mystery movies wrap everything up too neatly, and in so doing kill off any lingering resonance in the mind. As the credits roll, you feel the Dark City is still out there somewhere, awaiting your return.

Hundreds of Billy Corgans live beneath YOUR feet.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Screaming Mimi!

40s noirs are by far the most overrated genre, producing only one legit classic (1945's Kafkaesque Detour) and roughly 17,000 borefests hyped up by hipsters for recycling chiaroscuro visuals the German cinéma had strip-mined bare in the mid-silent era. 50s noirs, however, were much better, with highlights like Kiss Me Deadly pushing the format into more surreal nightmare territory where it properly belongs.

Imagine not putting your opening titles backwards just to freak people out.

But the best of all 50s noirs is the unpromisingly titled Screaming Mimi. When first I heard of such a kino, I assumed it was a comedy, in which context its noir atmospherics turned out to be all the more effective. Fellini waifu Anita Ekberg stars as Yolanda, a Hitchcockian blonde-in-trouble who emerges from the sea to be abruptly set upon by a knife-wielding psycho in a shower, prompting her to be committed to the care of a sleazy psychiatrist who soon becomes obsessed with her (he's literally me). In fact, if you edited the name Hitchcock into the opening titles this would fit perfectly in the middle of the master's Freudian oeuvre.

Someone in the production decided it would be extremely funny if the great Swede had a great Dane. I can't even be mad because I would have done the same thing.

Somehow the bad shrink takes to managing Yolanda in a nightclub act in which she dances sexily, which is a standard motif for noir but the movie has the uncommon courtesy to show us the whole routine twice, because in 1958 you got value for your ticket price.

15:27

41:45

Sadly for Sigmund Svengali, the nominal protagonist eventually shows up asking questions, prompting plot bullshit in which Yolanda is once again attacked by a mystery psycho. Will Rando Protagonist get to the bottom of this? Who cares? The movie drips with style like a nympho's panties. The investigation is a clothesline on which to drape moody setpieces, sketchy minor characters and made-up psychobabble that doesn't so much seek to elucidate the depths of the human psyche as to highlight their impenetrability.

I'd resist the urge to comment on her bodily penetrability but I know you got there about the same time I did.

"But Ekberg can't aaact", you wheedle, hoping m'lady Becky from HR will hear you counter-signalling the archetypal Stacy. Based Anita eschewed the acting lessons the studio procured for her at great expense in favour of horse-riding, probably because she understood that great beauties are a superior species and needn't demean themselves by learning to do silly things like pretend to be made-up characters, when they could ride horses and be beautiful instead. The paparazzi (the very word derives from La Dolce Vita, which for all its artistic pedigree is exclusively remembered for Ekberg's scenes) seethed at her otherworldliness, dubbing her Iceberg for her justified contempt for them. On one occasion when they bugged her, she shot at them with a bow and arrow.

My source for this is a 9Gag screenshot I found on Twitter, but you will never convince me it's not true.

There can be no doubt that the fountain scene in La Dolce Vita is the crowning jewel in the slim canon of normative cinéma, but few understand its genius at more than a surface level. To place any less a woman than Anita as the centrepiece of the fountain, surrounded by the carven gods of antiquity, would be mere safe-edgy vandalism; shabby, petty, redundant. Only Anita, living marble in the black-and-white photography of the film, could do the impossible and elevate the fountain by her presence. This is the real provocative; the real audacious; the real avant-garde: it consists in triumphant, transcendent hetero-maximalism.

This one was carved by God.

So while for many her career began and ended with that famous scene, Ekberg deserves to be celebrated more generally for embodying the normative spirit of Stacy aristocracy, and Screaming Mimi to be rediscovered as the overlooked gem that it is.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Showdown in Little Tokyo!

 

WE
WERE IN FACT
SHOGUNS N SHEEIT

At a lean 75 minutes, Showdown in Little Tokyo shows just how little plot and characterisation you can get away with in favour of action and banter and still produce something more entertaining than anything your normoid friends bug you to watch on Net Flix Plus Prime. Dolph Lundgren is the weeaboo cop out to avenge his parents' death at the hands of a yakuza thug. Brandon Lee is his bemused half-Azn partner who has no idea who Asuka and Rei are, or why it matters which is best. Tia Carrere is the hottie in the white tank top who falls for Lundgren's BWC.

Actual dialogue.

And Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is the villain, who is such an asshole he lets an underling dismember himself and present his severed finger to him in penance for failure, before killing him anyway.

In another scene he films himself decapitating a crack ho and then plays it back to Carrere while he rapes her. That's not a joke: he's just hilariously cuntish at every opportunity.

Lundgren and Lee team up to investigate Tagawa's nefarious plan to sell meth or whatever, which leads them through such cinematic vistas as this sushi bar where mobsters eat lunch off of naked chicks. I'm not aware that such places really exist but since knowing anything about Japanese culture has been rendered low-status by the weeb-shaming endemic in the neurotypical west, I'm going to feign ignorance and assume this is a ubiquitous Japanese custom.

Censored for icky female nipples.

Although it's nominally a buddy cop flick, there's a notable lack of any sort of chief or commissioner character dressing down our heroes for their reckless and flagrantly illegal antics, and the writers are well aware that they're not even trying to sell these guys as cops, as in one scene they emerge from a battle with the yakuza to see a cop car and high-tail it themselves.

The genius of lines like this is like a forgotten technology.

In fact, it's one of the few films I've seen that could stand to have a little more of that fillery background stuff, as you can easily imagine early drafts featuring more scenes of Lee listening incredulously as Lundgren waxes otaku about Godzilla movies and the power levels of Dragon Ball Z characters. The movie was cut heavily as a result of studio meddling and received a limited release to join the vast majority of movies that have generally been forgotten. On the other hand, there's nothing in the final cut that would suggest the plot ever involved much actual police work.

Lundgren demonstrates the sophisticated techniques familiar from JCS interrogation videos.

It's moreso just a movie about a couple of affable Chads becoming bros and killing an asshole in spectacular fashion. Lundgren and Lee are so likable you don't even really mind the movie skipping over the traditional tensions-between-the-unalike cops-gradually-giving-way-to-mutual-respect routine, because in real life any two guys with jaws like these two would just bond and excel effortlessly anyway. Were Hollywood not driven by the seething resentment of the dweebs, this type of Chadcore would prevail over the box office year round.

Somewhere Elliott Rodger is throwing another bitchfit.