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Akira Kurosawa’s matrix days epic, Ran (”Chaos,” 1985) is the almost perfect realization of more than ten years of planning, one that survived the cessation of numerous colleagues, the passing of the director’s wife, troubled financing, and other problems. After the relative omission of Dodes’ka-den in 1970 and a suicide attempt soon thereafter, Kurosawa came back Phoenix-similarly to with the Soviet-produced Dersu Uzala in 1975, and at the age of 70 released Kagemusha (1980), a veil partly financed by 20th Century-Fox and sponsored by disciples Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.

Kurosawa famously said later that he regarded Kagemusha, despite all its acclaim, as a mere warm-up to Ran and, truth be told, Kagemusha fails in fundamental ways that Ran does not. Grievously miscast after the sudden firing of Shintaro Katsu, for whom the picture was written, it suffered from notably bad acting on the part of last-minute replacement Tatsuya Nakadai (made all the more painful when one considers how great Toshiro Mifune might have been), an awful score, and overbearing desire to hammer home its Theme at the expense of all else.

After Kagemusha, Ran then is a revelation. Freely adapting King Lear to Japan’s bloody civil wars, the screenplay follows septuagenarian warlord Hidetora’s (Tatsuya Nakadai) ruin after a lifetime of violent rule comes back to haunt him in his old age. Experiencing nightmares and creeping senility, he abruptly abdicates his kingdom, dividing it among his sons (Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, and Daisuke Ryu), but years of bloody leadership have had their effect, and very quickly alliances break apart, familial ties crumble, and greed and vengeance come out into the open.

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All this unfolds as if viewed from the heavens, whose cloud formations seem to reflect sadly on man’s unending determination to destroy himself.

Japanese cinema scholar Donald Richie rightly called Ran “a tragedy with little hope but much understanding.” It’s infused with the same humanism found in all of Kurosawa’s best work, but told from the point of view of a much more pessimistic 75-year-old man. The emphasis on Hidetora’s past and its consequences is one the film’s greatest achievements, one that goes beyond Shakespeare’s play, and a concern Kurosawa rightly felt vital to understanding his main character. Hidetora’s backstory drives nearly everything that happens in the film, from the brother and sister who respond to Hidetora’s slaughter of their family with him retreating into Buddhism and she learning to release her hatred, to Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada in a superb, widely-acclaimed performance), whose very different reaction races to a kind of infernal bliss at the destruction of the Hidetora clan, ending with a spectacularly bloody bang.

As wrong as Nakadai was for Kagemusha, his performance in Ran is absolutely right. Indeed, the ensemble work across the board is splendid. For various reasons Kurosawa at this time enjoyed making surprising casting choices, and here all of them work, from transgender entertainer Peter as Hidetora’s jester, to Crazy Cats comedian Hitoshi Ueki as an allied warlord.

From a production standpoint, Ran is flawless, a technical achievement of monumental proportions, from Kurosawa’s electrifying battle scenes — filmed as seas of bright red, yellow, and blue flags with horrifying splendor blur as horses charge into waves of ultra-violence — to Emi Wada’s Oscar-winning Costume Design and Tameyuki Aimi’s Noh-based makeup. Unlike Shinichiro Ikebe’s utterly inadequate score for Kagemusha, Toru Takemitsu’s Mahler-esque cues for Ran complement the film marvelously.

All of this comes together in an extraordinary seven-minute battle sequence early in the film, one of ghastly, beautiful chaos without sound effects or dialogue of any kind. Instead, we hear only Takemitsu’s music amid flying arrows, pouring blood, dismembered limbs, flapping banners and, finally, leaping flames and billowing smoke.

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Remember the amazingly cool trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, where the Sith crashed a transport into a Jedi temple? Now you can meet the man in charge, Darth Malgus, an anti-hero so interesting he scores his own novel.

Darth Malgus made a huge impression at E3 last year, starring in one of the most impressive trailers we've seen for anything, ever. He'll be playing a big role in upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, and developer BioWare is giving him the royal treatment.

Not only does Darth Malgus score a brand new bio over at The Old Republic's holonet, he's starring in his own novel, Deceived, due out in December from Del Rey and written by noted Dungeons & Dragons novelist Paul S. Kemp.

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Did you know Darth Malgus took an alien female as a wife instead of a slave? The guy is nuts! Find out more at the Star Wars: The Old Republic website.

Revealing Darth Malgus, Dark Lord of the Sith [Star Wars: The Old Republic]

Send an email to Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at fahey@kotaku.com.

Political thriller in which the military Chiefs of Staff (led by Lancaster) plot to overthrow the US president (March) after he concludes what they consider to be a catastrophic nuclear entente with Russia. Collusion movies may have become more darkly complex in these post-Watergate days of Pakula and paranoia, but Frankenheimer’s fascination with gadgetry (in his compositions, the ubiquitous helicopters, TV screens, obscured cameras and electronic devices literally crawl the human characters into insignificance) is used to create a ripsnorting visual metaphor for control by the military utensil. Highly enjoyable.

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Bill Gibron is a veteran film critic from Tampa, Florida.

The story about how the spotless man cheated the African-American gone of his rhythm and blues heritage for the cash cow known as destroyed and roll is by now the line of legend. Heck, Little Richard's been living off that storyline concerning the last 20 years. Still, the truth about how misplaced immigrants teamed up with the marginalized minorities to bring into being the soundtrack to our enter-modern life is rife with obstacles, contradictions, and more than a minuscule anecdotal fantasy. Now comes
Cadillac Records,
hoping to spread graceful on Leonard Chess and his Chicago blues-based label. Moreover by leaving limerick quintessential character forbidden, and manufacturing more than miniature of its so-called truth, it's hard to rake fact from fiction.

Sick of working in the junk business, Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) decides to open a nightclub on Chicago's predominantly black South Side. When he discovers a Mississippi bluesman named Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), he burns down the club and uses the insurance money to buy a record studio. Soon, Chess has drawn in the likes of Waters, Little Walter (Columbus Short), Howlin' Wolf (Eamonn Walker), Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer) and, famously, Chuck Berry (Mos Def). But when the architect of rock-&-roll ends up in prison for violating the Mann Act, Chess has to find another star. She arrives in the person of Miss Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles), a fiery young singer with a world of pain in her voice. Yet the changing times and shifting musical landscape may just spell the end for Chess, once and for all.

Cadillac Records

is a movie of impressions — both literally and figuratively. On the solid side are amazing turns by Wright, Short, Walker, Cedric, and Mos Def as one gloriously goofy Chuck Berry. Even current superstar Beyoncé isn't completely out of her league here — she is playing a singer after all. More tenuous is writer/director Darnell Martin's grasp of the truth. There is never a mention of Leonard Chess' brother Phil (who bought into the business with his sibling), nary a nod to producer Phil Bass, and some of the more controversial elements of the studio (lawsuits, drugs, affairs) are swept away under the sonic roar of some amazing musical performances. This is one film that would clearly falter without its unbelievable soundtrack. Apparently, it's easier to ignore the facts when you're snapping your fingers and tapping your toes.

As an example of history at its slightest,

Cadillac Records

is solid, if superficial. The actors are required to add the depth that Martin's script regularly fails to offer. Elsewhere, intriguing elements are left unexplored. Eamonn Walker's Wolf is a major piece of work, and the ex-

Oz

man's take on the imposing musician is magical. But we don't get enough of it. Instead, Martin chooses to focus more on harmonica ace Little Walter, and while Short is equally good, his character arc is biopic basic. Even Chuck Berry, who seems to be the most whacked out figure in rock-&-roll's tortured history is relegated to clowning most of the time. And Brody, like Beyoncé, is merely a placeholder for the person he was hired to represent.

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Yet there is something undeniable about this film, a subtle, sublime feeling of watching pop culture folklore being crafted right before our eyes. When Walker wails on Wolf's 'Smoke Stack Midnight' or Wright wriggles to Water's seminal track 'Hoochie Coochie Man,' no fact-checking can stop the sensation. If one remembers this is a movie, and not a documentary, you'll walk away satisfied. But as a tribute to Chess and its importance to modern music, this is half-baked heritage, entertaining but incomplete.

The DVD includes deleted scenes, a commentary track, and two making-of featurettes.

He used to carry a guitar in a gunny sack.

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The Human Stain: Drama. Starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, Gary
Sinise and Ed Harris. Directed by Robert Benton. (R. 106 minutes. At Bay Area
theaters.)

"The Generous Stain" is a mediocre movie made by and for astute people.
That doesn't intermediate that, in the peter out, it's any larger than a usage Vin Diesel
picture, but there's an comprehensive sense of worthiness about it that's not
unearned. Good actors (Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman) and a good director
(Robert Benton) do their most successfully to put from a good book by a serious American
novelist (Philip Roth).

Unfortunately, just as exalted individuals can be done in by the most
pedestrian of ailments, "The Human Stain" falls victim to a fatal lack of
narrative drive, suspense and drama. Kidman and Hopkins are wrong for their
roles, and that, combined with a pervading inevitability, cuts the film off
from any sustained vitality. The result is something admirable but lifeless.

Still, there's pleasure to be had in watching the actors make the effort,
even if there's no mistaking that we're watching an effort — and no mistaking
that we're being offered effort, not truth, with the implicit idea that we
should admire it. When the patrician-looking Kidman, playing a cleaning lady,
rages about her white-trash life of tragedy and degradation, there's no
believing her, not for a second. But there's no reason not to watch, either.
Check it out: Kidman with a tattoo, yelling.

In the same spirit, we watch Anthony Hopkins play an African American
passing as Jewish, even though he looks neither black nor Jewish and doesn't
even bother to sound American. "He taught in England," we're told.

That a black man from Newark, N.J., pretending to be a white man from
Newark would adopt an English accent adds a whole layer of artifice that Roth
never anticipated. One could argue that it takes the character of Coleman Silk
and renders him finally and completely crazy, but that's not how we experience
it. Instead we experience "The Human Stain" as a movie about Hopkins and
Kidman kissing.

It's 1998, the year that Bill Clinton was impeached for making a fool of
himself, and Silk, an ostensibly Jewish professor of classics, is in trouble.
He has made an innocent statement that was deliberately misconstrued as racist,

and in reaction he quits. His wife dies, and he soon befriends the writer
Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's alter ego, played by Gary Sinise. Zuckerman is the
witness to the story, the narrator.

"The Human Stain" is a difficult book to adapt, full of digressions and
leaps back and forth in time. But the main difficulty is that the plot
elements are essentially disparate, in that one doesn't proceed from the other
in dramatic terms. The connections between Coleman's past and his present, his
race and his career, his sex life and the president's are all thematic, not
dramatic. In a book this isn't a problem — it could be a virtue — but in a
movie we feel the lack of build as a lack of urgency.

Benton ("Kramer vs. Kramer") and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer could have
chosen to surrender completely to the book by making their film into a
rumination on character. But that could have been worse. Instead, Meyer
slashes through the book's first 100 pages in a matter of minutes to get to
its narrative heart — Silk's revitalizing but perilous relationship with the
young cleaning woman.

Even with that, there's not much on which to hang a compelling dramatic
story. The professor's young lover does have a violent, insane ex-husband, but
his scariness is undercut by the casting of Ed Harris, who's more roguish than
threatening. But compounding the problem more than anything else is the esteem
in which the book is held, which prevents the filmmakers from wholesale
additions to the story. They'd have had more freedom with a so-so book and
might have made a better movie.

As it stands, the best scenes are the flashbacks to the '40s, with
Wentworth Miller quite believable as the young Coleman, who gradually decides
to turn his back on everything he is in order to become what he's not. The
pain of that process is real and seems more important than an old man's last,
Viagra-propelled romp through Cupid's grove.

Advisory: This film contains strong language, erotic situations and frontal
nudity.

This article appeared on page

D - 5

of the San Francisco Chronicle

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On Hell's Hero

The Outlaw Josey Wales


by Karli Lukas
Karli Lukas is a Melbourne based filmmaker and Grub Streeter. She currently serves on the committee of the Melbourne Cinémathèque Inc.


The Outlaw Josey Wales


(1976 USA 135 mins)

Outset:

ScreenSound Australia

Signal:

Robert Daley

Dir:

Clint Eastwood

Scr:

 Phil Kaufman, Sonia Chernus, from the novel 

Gone to Texas

 by Forrest Carter

Phot:

Bruce Surtees

Prod Des:

Tambi Larsen

Ed:

 Ferris Webster

Mus:

Jerry Fielding

Look for:

Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, John Vernon, Beak McKinney, Sondra Locke, Paula Trueman, Geraldine Kearns, Sam Bottoms

As a child, I was introduced to Clint Eastwood as an actor through the films

Every Which Way But Loose

(1978) and

Every Which Way You Can

(1980). Of course, at that age, the thing

I

most appreciated about those films was Clyde the orang-utan, whereas Mum and Dad watched them for Eastwood. It's only now, after watching a large body of Eastwood's work (encompassing actor, actor/director and director) that I understand just what my parents might have been enjoying about Eastwood in those hokey films. As his guardian, Eastwood was cheekily getting Clyde to literally ape the antics of his own past's extremely righteous, barely talkative, gun-totin' Man With No Name and Dirty Harry characters ? antics that Eastwood aficionados like my parents were paying to see. In so doing, Eastwood was simultaneously publicly acknowledging his aging and the durability of his stardom, while playfully subverting the audience's expectations about himself as the ?hero? figure. As Eastwood explained in a 1976 interview conducted during

The Outlaw Josey Wales

' post-production:

I think I appeal to the escapism in people ? the characters I play [?] I like those characters myself; that's why, maybe, I carry them to other extremes than my predecessors. [?] a ?Dirty Harry? character, a man who thinks on a very simple level and has very simple moral values, appeals to a great many people



(1)

.

Contrary to popular belief, there was a more complex and socially moralising Eastwood-as-Star beginning to metamorphose in much earlier films than his critically acclaimed masterpiece

Unforgiven

(1992) ? a work lauded at the time of its release as being ?the first film of Eastwood's old age?


(2)

. Such a figure is clearly seen in films as early as Don Siegel's

Coogan's Scarp

(1968) and

The Beguiled

(1970) as well as Eastwood's debut feature as overseer (and star),

Act Misty for Me

(1971). As Richard Combs identified, throughout his acting and directing career,

Eastwood has tapped, perhaps, into the essential comedy of this post-modern age, in which we take all our pleasures knowingly. He allows audiences to indulge every wish-fulfilment fantasy of super-competent heroism without having to believe in the hero.

Which is not to say that he is drained of positive value ? just that his heroism is exercised as a self-conscious gesture, as if 'doing right' was somehow detached from personal virtue

(3)

.
In fact, Eastwood's self-satirising of his Eastwood-as-Star persona coincided with the rise in popularity of the Hollywood action blockbuster and the later emergence of other, mostly younger action hero figures (e.g. Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the mid to late 1980s). These new stars all used the Eastwood-as-Star persona as a template from which to fashion a seemingly more contemporary version of the male American hero (in reality, however, many of them seem more like parodies or at best, homages). Unlike his action genre contemporaries such as Charles Bronson, Eastwood seemed to have responded to this challenge as an actor/director by pursuing more independent projects that both acknowledged his acting

oeuvre

as well as his other off-screen (that is real-life) interests and social causes. Eastwood began to imbue his Eastwood-as-Star hero template with an increasingly ?liberal? social awareness, helping us to further fuse Eastwood (the actual man) with Eastwood-as-Star. This has ultimately resulted in Eastwood-as-Star becoming a more three-dimensional figure who remains familiar yet chimerical, a ploy that has sustained a remarkably long career.

Eastwood's constant re-sketching of and playful ambivalence towards Eastwood-as-Star is brilliantly illustrated in

The Outlaw Josey Wales

(1976), his fifth feature as director (and fourth as actor/director). It is a film where Eastwood and Eastwood-as-Star is ?scrambled and remade several times?

(4)

, as he's forced to rescue a never-ending series of social misfits and outcasts and keep them under his wing.

From the film's very first shot, Eastwood is rendered immortal (?good?) by the streaks of summer haze that set the scene aglow by the sun's heavenly backlight. He's seen ploughing a field with his son, notably referred to as ?Little Josey? ? a smaller, equally humble, noble, and physically similar, version of Eastwood himself. They are so similar they don't even need to exchange words to communicate. The wordless relationship between Josey and Little Josey heightens the definite impression that the person we've been introduced to is

not

the vengeful/?bad? Eastwood-as-Star, but the wholesome Eastwood. Clearly, the

mise en scène

is telling us that what we are seeing is a storybook version not just of the pastoral West, but also of the legendary Eastwood.

This opening idyll is quickly dashed by the thunderous hooves of the Kansas Red Legs; seeing a pall of smoke from the direction of his homestead, Eastwood happens upon a scene that physically and psychologically scars his character Josey for the rest of the film, that of his wife being raped and his son being burned alive. As he tries to intervene, he is struck down several times, finally reeling into unconsciousness after receiving a hefty sabre blow to the head. As he passes out, paralysed, his vision of the storybook land becomes nonsensical and wild. We hear his son, Little Josey (Eastwood's own mirror of innocence and ?goodness?), calling out to him as everything quickly fades to black. When he wakens, both his wife and son are dead. Surviving their death thus provides the impetus for Eastwood's Incredible Hulk-like transition into Eastwood-as-Star.

The next scene initially appears to be incredibly hammy; Eastwood falls over the makeshift cross he's made to mark his family's grave, sobbing with grief. However, upon repeated viewings of the film, this scene is more interesting and emotionally complex than it first appears. It begins with Eastwood hammering in the wooden cross with the back of a shovel and falling to his knees ? partly in grief, admittedly ? but also in obvious anger. As he drapes himself

over

the cross, crucifixion style, and then

falls over

with it into the dirt sobbing, it's actually more accurate to read his actions as a literal blow-by-blow rejection of God, love and humanity in favour of the only alternative he knows ? hell! This reading is further compounded by the fact that we next see Eastwood from various distances and camera angles as a silent, faceless, brooding, lone dark figure set against an increasingly imposing wilderness. He then joins Bloody Bill Anderson's Missouri Raiders to ?set things right? with the Union loving Red Legs. The film then proceeds to show Eastwood's transition, through a montage sequence during the opening credits, to the Eastwood-as-Star persona. By the end of this sequence we see him as an unacknowledged and principled leader of the rabble who refuses to surrender his new lifestyle, choosing instead to become ?the outlaw? Josey Wales.

For the remainder of the film, Josey is forced to acknowledge the existence of his dual personas. He's put in situations where he's forced to acquire a new ?family? by happenstance, such as his fellow outlaw's massacre or Laura Lee's (Sondra Locke) and Little Moonlight's (Geraldine Keams) near-rapes. However, in scenes heralding a threat to Eastwood's new family, flashes to visual and aural elements from the opening homestead raid and burial sequence are repeated as psychological echoes (acting as premonitions and flashbacks). The jarring quality of these signs of mourning, speak of Eastwood's repressed rage, dread and reticence about his inevitable transition to Eastwood-as-Star. Notably, he always disappears briefly from the screen during his transformation, the effect of which is to both build audience expectation about the forthcoming violence that he commits and to signal that it is out of his control because it's morally ?just?. When he reappears however, just before he enters the fray, the

mise en scène

always describes him to the onlookers as an ambiguous presence. Set either into the recesses of deep shadow, with a carefully choreographed slash of light falling on just one intensely blue eye, or as a translucent apparition coming out of the sun, they're never absolutely sure of which Eastwood he is. Hence the necessity of enlisting featured side-kick characters like Lone Wattie (Chief Dan George) who do the announcing for them (and us). For example, at one point he declares to Laura Lee: ?Get ready little lady. Hell's coming to breakfast!? And it is for precisely these indulgent moments that the older Eastwood films are significant, glorious, and more importantly, despite all their violence, fun.

© Karli Lukas, February 2004
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to the editors

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Endnotes

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