squidpants

so I was looking at Yahoo Sports today and saw this headline: "2005 Hall of Fame ceremonies include deceased Gunter". I think they need to reword this.

In other news, I saw Akira Kurosawa's Ran the other day. I remember seeing a movie a long time ago about feudal Japan with lots of cool battles and guys with flags on their hats and I thought I'd try to figure out what it was. I guessed it might be a Kurosawa movie, and I read this one was good, so I got it. It wasn't the one I was looking for (my friend thinks that is Kagemusha, so I'll get that next), but it was interesting. It's basically a version of King Lear played out in feudal Japan. Unfortunately I didn't get to finish it because it's 3 hours long and I waited to watch it the day I had to return it, but I saw probably 2.5 hours of it.

While I was watching it, I was sort of annoyed, because some of the subtitles were messed up with typos, and the old king character was obviously a younger actor with lots of bad makeup. The jester character was kind of weird too, (which is the idea, since he's a jester, but still) and it was strange already knowing most of the story but seeing it in a new way - I sort of knew what to expect. Also, the battle scenes were confusing in that I didn't know whose army was on whose side, and thus who was winning and so on. One line like "oh no, so and so's army is attacking us with so and so!" would have helped that immensely. Also, some of the emotions and acting seemed very stylized, but I guess that's Shakespeare and a Japanese costume drama for you. So I didn't think I liked it very much. However, a couple days afterwards, I'm still thinking of certain scenes and themes and images, there were a lot of great landscapes and shots of castles and plains and so on - really cool looking places I'd never seen before. So while I wasn't having that great of a time watching it, the fact that it stayed with me for this long makes me want to see it again. Maybe I'll be more used to the stylized acting and the bad makeup.