As I'm planning on taking part in a Best Films of the 1980s poll, I'm trying to catch up on a lot of stuff I'd missed over the years. I always overlooked the 80s as a kind of wasteland of movies, but the more I see, the more it's becoming one of my favourite, overlooked decades.

Ran: I watched this years ago, and was bored to tears, but that was back when I had little tolerance for anything more than 3-4 years old, foreign, or slow-paced. Coming back to it now is like a revelation. Ran is Akira Kurosawa's beautiful, sorrowful take on King Lear. An aging Lord, Hidetora, divides up his kingdom amongst his three sons, and then stands back and watches as they turn on one another. What I like about Kurosawa's version is that Hidetora is no saint. You feel sorry for him, but at the same time, can't help but feel it's fate coming back on him for all the awful things he's done in his years of plunder and conquest. Kurosawa made this film at age 75 and you can't help but think that he might not have been able to make it at any other age. In the hands of a younger director, the temptation would have been to turn Hidetora into a cautionary character. But, Kurosawa understands a life fully lived, with regrets and disappointments, and Hidetora never descends into parody or morality. A fantastic movie that will rank highly amongst the best the 80s have to offer.


A Room With A View: I'll be honest, the main reasons I saw this movie were threefold: 1) It's something actually available in my terrible, terrible local video stores; 2) It was less than two hours and I really didn't want to rent anything else over two hours when I was already renting Ran; and 3) Denholm Elliott is in it (I just finished watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and forget what anyone says, Elliott steals the film as Marcus Brody, not Sean Connery). I've never been much for period/costume dramas, and was a little leery of anything Merchant & Ivory (Since the only M&I film I'd seen was Le Divorce which irritated and bored me). But, this was terriffic, a beautifully photographed love story. Young Lucy Honeychurch (a 19-year-old Helena Bonham Carter) is on vacation in Italy where she meets the free-spirited George Emerson (Julian Sands) and falls for him, but social graces and all prohibit that and she returns to England and finds herself quickly engaged to bookish Cecil (Daniel Day Lewis), but complications come up when Cecil meets the Emersons in an art gallery, and knowing nothing of their past in Italy, has them rent out a cottage just up the road from Lucy. It's a rapturous, and surprisingly funny love story. A real surprise, this will figure prominently in my list, as well.

Next Time: Any combination of The King of Comedy, Brazil, Always, Akira, or Women On the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown.