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.

Homework Movie - On Dangerous Ground (1952)

On Dangerous Ground starts off with a very rough and tumble look at a sharp but very tough police detective on the force named Jim Wilson. He been suspended a few times for being too rough with the captives and his captain is about to kick him off the force when a case comes up that will get Wilson out of the city for a few days on a errant case involving a murder suspect. Robert Ryan plays Wilson, a man who's not afraid to get into it with the bad guys, comes off as a bad guy himself, even to his partners.

Mostly known for his directing of Rebel Without a cause, Nicolas Ray had made over three decades of movies with a darker, underbelly of life, approach. This movie takes our hero from his place of business in the city to the mountainous country of Colorado to find a killer on the lose. When he gets there, Wilson is teamed up with the local father of the deceased to find his daughter's killer. This brings him to the cabin in the snowy mountains of Mary, who's own brother is the prime suspect in the case. It's Mary's strong will and determination that convinces Wilson to hear out Mary's plea to capture her brother, rather than killing him on the spot. Never once did her disability come into the thought of Wilson when it came time to tell Mr. Brent to back off.

The major contrast of the city from the mountains played a part in softening the hardened police detective. He was genuinely concerned for Mary's safety once he learned that she was blind, despite her reassurance that she would be fine. She even went to search for her brother once she realized he was their suspect.

In all of this week’s movies, the bad guys were nicely captured and the story wraps up neat at the end of each movie. It wasn't until later on when crooks would be able to get away and that would be how the movie would end. Justice was served in this case, as in the rest of the weeks movies. Even in the Big Heat where the crime spread into the police force, the straight cop finds a way to figure out just who to trust in the department and smoked out the crooked cops all the way to the top.