- directed by Akira Kurosawa
A Japanese period drama adapted from William Shakespeare's King Lear; A tale of an aging king driven to madness by his feuding sons; a house divided by avarice and treachery.
I wanna keep this short and sweet (along with future Fetish posts), so I'll just say that I liked the film. I didn't love it, but I did enjoy myself. It's hard to go wrong when you pair two geniuses like Kurosawa and Shakespeare. However, given that the story is so simple the film is largely a visual experience and that might have to do with my lukewarm reception; I didn't view the best version of this film... I missed out on the Criterion edition. The copy I saw was the original DVD transfer and it looked quite muddy. If I had viewed the pristine version of the film I might have been bowled over by the visual impact, so much so that I might have forgiven the film's slight failings. The story, or, at least the screenplay seems to be quite lite with Kurosawa's epics... lite and drawn out. It's hard to live up to Shakespeare but if the writing were anywhere near as interesting I might have been able to forgive the muddy visuals. Anyway, it's a solid film... sadly despite my viewing experience, at this point, Kurosawa is working against himself; the film is nowhere as compelling as his earlier work.
7/10 A visual treat of period Japan underlying one of Shakespeare's great works.
DS333, underwhelmed.
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