Ash The Watcher

RAN-1985 or I wanna be  the king.... Director_____Akira Kurosawa Country_____Japan Coming to think of it now, I would say that this movie caught me off guard. I just wasn’t prepared for this level of grandness. This was my first Kurosawa movie, and I had gone in not really knowing what to expect. Released in 1985, Ran is arguably his last masterpiece. It was the 80’s and Kurosawa then in his seventies was no longer the man he once had been, movies were few and far between and age was catching up with him, finances were low but not his appetite for producing great cinema. Though the idea for Ran was long in his mind, but it wasn’t until he received financial support from producer Serge Silberman, he was finally able to materialize it. This was the third time he was taking on Shakespeare. First being ‘Throne of Blood’, which was an adaptation of ‘Macbeth’, the other one being ‘The Bad Sleep Well’, loosely based on ‘Hamlet’. This time it was the tragical s

THE  GODFATHER -1 972 or We are family... Director_____Francis Ford Coppola Country_____USA To say I was born a lover of quality cinema would be a blatant lie. I used to be one those regular ‘watch-a-movie-once-in-a-while’ kinda guy, not really that into the beauty of cinema. But one fine evening, I let Coppola, guide me into world of the Corleones, and nothing was ever the same again. No, I didn’t become a movie buff overnight, but ‘The Godfather’ exposed to me a level of cinema that I had never experienced before, leaving in me a new taste for movies of such calibre. Considering all the success it has had in all the past decades, since its release in 1972, it’s kind of interesting to note the sheer number of difficulties, the production ran into. The lack of trust on the then inexperienced Coppola, the producers outright refusal to cast Brando as Vito, the hurdles in getting Pacino as Michael, the clashes with the production et al. The only reason this movie exi