"RAN" (1985, Dir: Akira Kurosawa)

"RAN" (1985, Dir: Akira Kurosawa)

January 23, 2026 · 1h 37m

About this episode

The episode discusses Akira Kurosawa's film RAN and its connections to Shakespeare's KING LEAR, exploring themes of war and cinematic storytelling.

The master is here folks and this time he wields the themes and some of the particulars of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S great work KING LEAR in service of a hypnotic nightmare about the horrors of war. It whips! We talk about that, about Kurosawa as a supremely 'Cinematic' figure trying on a 'Theatatrical' think in this movie, Lear as an eternal political fable, some of the hot shit sequences in here, and other stuff. this is a weird way to deal with this bit theres a lot of interesting academic writing about RAN out there, in shakespeare journals and filmic ones. peek around if you wanna learn something . Check out the show on Letterboxd if you're into that thing . Matt is also on there . We also got a Bluesky going. Matt's rec is in theaters. Corbin's rec is mega off the done. We dont know what the next episode is, for reasons that would take too long to explin here. Thanks!

People in this episode

Hosts: Corbin Smith, Matt Ellis

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: RAN, KING LEAR

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