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.

Takeshis' (Directed by Takeshi Kitano): So, Takeshi Kitano, well-known Japanese director, is finishing up his latest movie when he runs into an actor who looks exactly like him, has the same name, but is blonde. Just what happens from here on out, is really up for grabs. First, the second Kitano continues to audition for movies, once he gets one, he picks up a gun to practice. From there on out, all hell breaks loose. Kitano goes on a rampage, shooting everyone who has treated him poorly over the course of his life: Mahjonng parlour operators, cranky cooks, cops, and any other tormentors. He guns down a man who constanly mocks his audition failures, then takes the man's girlfriend. What's completely fascinating is that none of this takes place in any kind of reality. The woman he takes as his girlfriend, is also the girlfriend of the real Kitano, her dead boyfriend is one person to the second Kitano, and someone else to the real Kitano. It's off the wall, and often hilarious, like the gun battle where the sparks of the gunfire turn into star constellations. But, it's also surprisingly touching. The gun battle on the beach, where Kitano takes on police, swordsmen, and sumo wrestlers is wacky, but the music is sad, along with the expression on his face. It felt to me like it was a send-off, a farewell to the yakuza genre Kitano has explored througout the years. This is, by far, Kitano's most complicated movie. Most of the user comments on IMDB state that to enjoy 'Takeshis' you have to be a Kitano fan, but I think it's more than that. To enjoy 'Takeshis', you really have to be willing to let its zaniness not overwhelm you, and dig deeper into the film. It's really like a Takeshi Kitano take on a Jean-Luc Godard movie. Recent quotes seem to indicate that Kitano, himself, is unsure about this movie, that he likens it to a car that is too fast for him. But, it's an admirable film, one that gives you no answers, and let's you make your own questions.

The Squid and the Whale (directed by Noah Baumbach): It's funny to see this categorized as a comedy, because there are funny elements, but it's ultimately one of the sadder films I've seen, recently. Walt and Frank (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) are the sons of two intellectuals, Joan (Laura Linney) and Bernard (Jeff Daniels) who are now separating. Joan is an up and coming writer, while Bernard is on the downswing of a career that once showed limitless promise. Walt is devoted to his father, he criticizes his mother for leaving Bernard just because he's not as successful as he once was. Frank is more drawn to his mother, he swears when he's told that he looks more like his father than mother. The problem is that neither Joan or Bernard are good parents. Bernard is opinionated and blunt. He tells Walt the reason that he and his wife are separating is because of his wife's affairs, then proceeds to tell his sons all about their mother's infidelity. Joan is also hypercritical, after Walt plays her a song and says he's going to play it in front of the school, she tells him that he needs to practise. Bernard and Joan's inability to be good parents leads to problems with their children, Walt plagiarizes a song to play in front of the school and tells everyone he wrote it, Frank starts drinking (He's in elementary school) and masturbating constantly. The children are completely damaged because of their upbringing: Walt has no opinions of his own, he just regurgitates his own father's opinions, Frank looks up to the pro at the local tennis school (William Baldwin) as a father figure so much that he aspires to become one, himself. It's a sometimes funny, often heartbreaking look at a fractured family. Highly Recommended.