Movies & TV Apr 8, 2010 at 4:00 am

Ran: The Masterpiece of Masterpieces

Comments

1
The restoration looks amazing. The Rialto trailer reminded me, however, what a wasted opportunity it was to have Toru Takemitsu doing the score for this film. Those sappy strains of pseudo-Mahler are a sad reminder that Kurosawa had poor taste in music. You've got Takemitsu, a great composer, and you tell the guy to compose something so ponderous, dopey, Teutonic and Romantic? Ugh.

Anyway, I can't wait to see this one again. It really is a piece of directorial bravado and some of the most ambitious mis-en-scene ever attempted. We'll never see a production as good as this again, especially since the advent of CGI.
2
Kurosawa didn't so much have bad taste in music, but had a belief that music only interfered with the imagery, so he tried to minimalize it as much as possible. He eased back on that later, but for a lot of his career, pieces would be stripped down to single instruments, and they'd tend to have an incomplete, plaintive sort of feel.

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