Homework Movie - Cure (1997)

            When I first saw the movie title, I thought the 1997 movie Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa was going to be a routine psychotic killer movie.  What I witnessed was anything but.  The beginning starts out a little bit comical with a dark twist, and it continues from there.  Most of the victims aren't suspecting their fate and the murderers are aware of their crimes, but can't seem to stop themselves.  And it seems that one person is able to travel between victim and murderer without being captured for almost the whole movie, that is until the Inspector played by Kôji Yakusho gets his man with good old-fashioned police work.  The only problem with that is, the pattern doesn't stop there.

             At the time of filming this movie, Kôji Yakusho had already been an accomplished actor for several decades in his home country, much like his director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is not related to Akira Kurosawa.  This movie marks the first time these two men worked together, and they have worked now on six films together since.  After this film, the two made the 2001 film Pulse, which later got an American version in 2006 starring Kristen Bell and several other up and comers in Hollywood.

            I found it interesting that some of the sets were very large spaces with perfectly placed props that people used.  After such a long time making movies, there should have been more planning involved to make more sense of things like perfectly placed seats and objects to use as weapons.  There were some clever bits when using light sources for triggers of the killings and then the Inspector's constantly finding need to look at similar light sources.

            Over the years in Japan as with any country, the storytelling has improved.  Cure takes a supernatural twist over movies such as Jigoku, which we watched in class.  The levels of Hell are depicted over a man's guilt for a crime he wanted to report, but didn't due to peer pressure not to.  In a twisted manner, the movie Suicide Club's beginning is similar to Cure's in which there is some serious moments and then a wide angle shot of something that strikes me as funny.  The way the students jumped into the oncoming train in their suicide pact was shot in a way that although horrifying, looked really strange and made me laugh, not shriek in horror.