Cure

Rating:
Summary: triumph of aesthetics; failure of substance
Review: It seems that all Japanese screenwriters have needed to do in the last 10-15 years to win the praise of 'artistiques' and commoners alike is ask "who am i?" Asking questions and not answering them, though, (especially when those questions are what elevate your film from gratuity to meaning) is a style of storytelling which I think should, for the most part, be avoided henceforth. If I hear "watashi/boku/ore wa... dare????" in a pleading tone one more time....

The premise of Cure is adequately intriguing. The aesthetic elements, which others have touched on, are also well-handled--especially since their utter pointlessness is not revealed until you've sat through much of the movie already. Its not unlike a child being told Santa doesn't exist on Christmas Eve; the tension which the film spent building disappears with the "whatever-you-want" ending.

"A-ha! But you didn't understand the ending!" Not quite. The ending itself is easy to understand; what makes no sense is the motivations of the characters. And that is where this film ultimately falls apart. [[semi-spoilers below]]

If no suitable motivation is given for characters to 'turn evil,' then, aside from simply being confusing, the only viable message is that "evil exists in the world," and superficial variations thereof. Interestingly enough, this oh-so-amazing theme is what most of the reviews here cite as 'deep and thought provoking.' Watch your step--you may fall into the chasm of my YAWN.

Others will say there are plenty of motivations. Surely, there is a connect-the-dots sequence of events. But how ever *you* may draw those lines, I can draw equally plausible ones from other "evidence" (haha) in the film. What made him change? The impaired wife? The occultism he was drawn into?

You tell me your interpretation, and I'll tell you mine, and we'll all just get along in this fun world of film! It could be X! It could by Y, or even Z!

...it could be any letter of the alphabet because the director/writer retreats from making a definitive statement. And frankly, if I want paint thrown on the canvas randomly, I can do it myself. I don't think the point of art (and surely not entertainment!) is to ask questions and not answer them. That is called life, and I get plenty of it everyday.

Rating:
Summary: triumph of aesthetics; failure of substance
Review: It seems that all Japanese screenwriters have needed to do in the last 10-15 years to win the praise of 'artistiques' and commoners alike is ask "who am i?" Asking questions and not answering them, though, (especially when those questions are what elevate your film from gratuity to meaning) is a style of storytelling which I think should, for the most part, be avoided henceforth. If I hear "watashi/boku/ore wa... dare????" in a pleading tone one more time....

The premise of Cure is adequately intriguing. The aesthetic elements, which others have touched on, are also well-handled--especially since their utter pointlessness is not revealed until you've sat through much of the movie already. Its not unlike a child being told Santa doesn't exist on Christmas Eve; the tension which the film spent building disappears with the "whatever-you-want" ending.

"A-ha! But you didn't understand the ending!" Not quite. The ending itself is easy to understand; what makes no sense is the motivations of the characters. And that is where this film ultimately falls apart. [[semi-spoilers below]]

If no suitable motivation is given for characters to 'turn evil,' then, aside from simply being confusing, the only viable message is that "evil exists in the world," and superficial variations thereof. Interestingly enough, this oh-so-amazing theme is what most of the reviews here cite as 'deep and thought provoking.' Watch your step--you may fall into the chasm of my YAWN.

Others will say there are plenty of motivations. Surely, there is a connect-the-dots sequence of events. But how ever *you* may draw those lines, I can draw equally plausible ones from other "evidence" (haha) in the film. What made him change? The impaired wife? The occultism he was drawn into?

You tell me your interpretation, and I'll tell you mine, and we'll all just get along in this fun world of film! It could be X! It could by Y, or even Z!

...it could be any letter of the alphabet because the director/writer retreats from making a definitive statement. And frankly, if I want paint thrown on the canvas randomly, I can do it myself. I don't think the point of art (and surely not entertainment!) is to ask questions and not answer them. That is called life, and I get plenty of it everyday.

Rating:
Summary: Disease
Review: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's tight, mesmerizing, brutal little puzzle-box of a horror-film "Cure" ("Kyua") deserves the highest praise I can offer: as jaded as I am, it thoroughly creeped me out, sent me to bed at 4 in the morning, and gave me a door-prize in the form of a shivery, watery little nightmare (the first I've had in about two years).

I am in awe of director Kurosawa.

I am in awe of this marvellous little masterwork of grue and madness. Like "Cure"'s stoic, besieged Detective Takabe (a note-perfect role turned in by the masterful Koji Yakusho, at once world-weary, doggedly determined, and compulsive): I am repelled *and* compelled. I am simultaneously revulsed and fascinated.

Did I mention that "Cure" is really one of the scariest, nastiest, most terrifying little creep-fests I have ever had the delight to watch?

Be warned: "Cure" does not milk its scares with sudden jump-shocks, like its more familiar (to American audiences) "Ringu" and "Ju-On" have done. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those movies, but "Cure" isn't that type of film; its horrors are far more subtle but infinitely more disturbing. It doesn't work on jump-scares; it doesn't need to.

I have written that the most effective Asian horror films (as well as a few of Miike's horror-Yakuza movies) possess a kind of "viral" quality. Like a virus, the danger is exposure, and as a victim you don't know exactly when you're infected. Like a virus, the symptoms aren't immediately apparent: the virus burrows into one cell, eats it alive, explodes its cell walls, sends out a burst of colonial spores. Your body and mind are turned against you, turned into a factory producing more of the virus, and you explode outwards, infecting the trusting, helpless, unwitting hordes around you.

OK, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but I think "Cure" is very viral: Kurosawa and Director of Photography guru Tokushu Kikimura (who has since done the cinematography for "Ringu" director Hideo Nakata's "Chaos" as well as both "Ju-On" outtings with Takashi Shimizu) turn all their art, and all their cinematic arsenal, on besieging the unwitting viewer, on assaulting the senses---but my God, with such subtlety that you never realize you're under siege until it's too late!

The plot is spare enough and Kurosawa gets right to work on conjuring up madness and alienation: we walk alongside a Tokyo businessman through a dim stretch of pedestrian tunnel. He wrenches part of an iron-handrail from its casement as the neon tunnel lights hiss and flicker. Later, he paces out of his apartment's bathroom, and uses the bludgeon on his wife; the police find him huddled and gibbering in one of the building's supply cabinets.

So here we have it: Tokyo has been ravaged by a string of brutal and supposedly unrelated serial murders, the victims slaughtered and an "X" carved into their throats. The catch: the killers are all unrelated, and from a wide range of professions---and with no criminal records.

There is one connection: each of the victims had brief contact with an unassuming young man, an amnesiac named Kunio Mamiya (played here by the accomplished and full-bore creepy Masato Hagiwara). Detective Takabe, beset with his own problems (including an amnesiac wife), leads the interrogation of Mamiya, and what follows is an intense, gruelling game of psychological cat-and-mouse that makes the intellectual swordfight between Hannibal Lecter and Agent Starling from "Silence of the Lambs" look like a playground fight between spoiled toddlers.

Kurosawa works his sorcery on a palette of silence---that is, he understands the role silence itself plays in making the mind receptive to true horror. "Cure" is fascinated by hypnosis, by mental suggestion, by mesmerism; the sinister Mamiya, himself a human tabula rasa, studies Mesmer and uses a lighter to lead his victims?---accomplices?---students?---into the darkness. Like hypnosis, Kurosawa dominates his audience by degrees, by insinuation, by stealth.

The world of "Cure" is equally sick: this is a film of long silent stretches broken up by whispered dialogue, by ominous, guttural, industrial groans that are nearly subliminal. It is a world of rotten, derelict warehouses, dirty restrooms, and anonymous apartment tower blocks; of tomb-like pedestrian tunnels and concrete urban hellscapes, studded with blast furnaces and crumbling, diseased factories.

The danger of "Cure" is alienation, of losing oneself in the industrial wilderness. "Who are you?" asks our villain, plaintively---but insidiously. Masato Hagiwara is brilliant as the enigmatic Mamiya: he would confound Socrates with his endless questions. But he plays the role as a canny predator: watch how quickly his aimless little stream of harmless questions turns into a flood, and turns the tables on his interrogators.

"Cure" has inevitably been compared with American serial-killer classics like "Silence of the Lambs" and "Se7en": the comparison is unfair to those films and does a monstrous disservice to "Cure", which has its own wicked melody to sing in the darkness. For unlike its Western cousins in bloodletting, whose monsters are ultimately packaged up for analysis and rational experimentation, the monster in "Cure" stays in its box long enough---and only because it wants---to fool its prey.

Sweet dreams.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant.
Review: Kyua (Kyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

Veteran director Kyoshi Kurosawa (Serpent's Path, the recently-optioned Pulse) weighs in with this 1997 offering, and the best way to describe it is giallo gone Yakuza. It has all the highlights of good giallo, from an overly gory mystery storyline to broad cinematic shots in the best Argento style to characters who sometimes just say the silliest things imaginable to one particular plot twist that makes absolutely no sense to anyone until you've seen the movie fifty times. And with the Japanese so much farther out on the bleeding edge of extreme horror than the Italians these days, you can bet a Japanese giallo is going to be two hours of bang-up knockdown bloody fun. And oh, my, it is.

Cure (the English title) revolves around a series of brutal murders with one thing in common: the throat of each victim is slashed in a large X. Kenichi Takabe (Koji Yakusho of Tampopo, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge, etc.), the inspector assigned to the murders, soon discovers that they all seem to center around an odd amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara). He's not the murderer, but each one of the murderers-yes, they're all different people-came into contact with him not long before killing their victims.

While the style is giallo all the way, the pacing is Japanese New Horror. Kurosawa starts things off in the nastiest way possible, then gives us the finding of the amnesiac and some buildup in the characters of Kenichi and his reluctant partner in this, Makoto Sakuma (Tsuyoshi Ujiki of The Eight-Tomb City and Full metal Yakuza fame) before the murders kick off again and everything rolls into high gear. There are more than enough snippets to satisfy gorehounds and a fine, albeit slowly-paced, mystery for fans of more explicit mysteries (I'm sure I'm not the only one who spent the latter half of the film drawing comparisons to Silence of the Lambs). But the true fanatic audience of this film are going to be the giallo lovers, those who eagerly await every new film from Dario Argento. For them, Kurosawa is sure to be a fantastic find. Hopefully, everyone else will come up to speed eventually (perhaps when the American version of Pulse, directed by... ulp... Wes Craven, is released next year). *** ½

Rating:
Summary: An unusual pattern of murder.
Review: People are turning up dead, and the murders are connected by a similarity in the mutilation of the corpses. However, each murder seems to have been committed by a different person--a person who, in some cases, was a close relative or acquaintance of the victim. Eventually the police discover that an amnesiac man has turned up at many of the murder sites. This man, though, seems to have neither long-term nor short-term memories; he often cannot remember a question long enough to answer it. A certain police detective Katabe follows a trail to uncover the man's dangerous secrets, and he risks getting far more involved than he should.

"Cure" treads similar psychic territory to "The Cell" and "Paperhouse" while avoiding the shared-dream phenomenon and relying on imagery which is much more subtle and often more effective. The director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is consistently elliptical in his methods--meaning that he leaves certain gaps in the film and invites the audience to fill them in. Well-considered ingenuity is good, but abstraction taken to the point of chaos is bad. When it comes to imagery, Kurosawa's elliptical method compliments his audience, assuming that people can make certain necessary logical deductions, associating visual cues with their psychic equivalent. But when this technique is applied to plot, things get a little messy. Something is definitely wrong when, even after the film is finished, the audience has to wonder: When did this particular event occur? Who caused it? Did it really happen or not? Such questions plague the film's ending, and confusion in a plot-dependent film is, quite obviously, bad.

Regardless of its flaws, "Cure" is a welcome addition to the genre for its spare use of graphic imagery and for the attitude of intellectual respect Kurosawa shows his audience.

Rating:
Summary: A real masterpiece
Review: The serial killer movie has by now been done to death (so to speak), so it's especially rewarding to see this assured film that takes a truly ingenious approach. Kurosawa's protagonist is a seemingly dazed young man who, in spite of his aimless demeanor, is a master hypnotist. To reveal any more of what happens would be to give a bit too much away.

The subtlety and fluidity of this film is remarkable. The main character can be charming and simultaneously irritating when he speaks. He turns his speaking partner's question back on the speaker; he answers with vague phrases that nevertheless, over the course of the film, gradually bring out the complexity of his psyche. Pitting him against a cop whose wife seems to suffer from something like the hypnotist's 'brand' of mental wanderings underlines the thematic context of the film: what we know is almost certainly only what we think we know. And what we think we know is almost certainly based on someone else's 'knowledge', derived the same as ours.

That knowledge is a collective phenomenon, a shared and critical feature of the 'hive' is not a novel concept in film. But its presentation here is bold and original. To link that idea with a person who destroys life is a master stroke; it says that what we know vanishes in a suddenly extinguished flame, or a tiny stream of water that appears, runs, and then is seen no more.

This is a film that should definitely be added to the great films of the 90s. Since it was not released in the U.S. until 2001, I vote for it being one of the great films of that year here.

Rating:
Summary: Just what the doctor ordered.
Review: They need to make more movies like this!

I am in violent disagreement with another reviewer as to whether or not the narrative ellipses, which I had occasion to puzzle over myself last night while watching this, constitute flaws. They seem to me carefully considered, well thought out and perfectly appropriate in context.

One of the things that I really loathe about most American films is their slavish insistence on linear narrative - which has kept American audiences (or rather, audiences for American films - a blight that spans the globe) in a state of arrested development. Narrative breakdown and abstraction have appeared with increasing frequency in the last century, probably as a means of keeping artists from becoming bored with their own work. Airtight narrative too often resembles a creative trap. Witness the reaction of an audience to, say, Miike Takashi's "Dead or Alive" and it begins to resemble a drug for suspension of disbelief junkies. When the filmmaker sends an already implausible storyline over the edge, some people react with hostility - as if they weren't aware that it was only a movie. (More likely, they simply resent being reminded.) Consider the alternative, though. Any conclusion that didn't violate the laws of linear narrative would necessarily be a predictable and unsatisfying bore. Better that artists should launch fully into the realms that open up when filmmaking is treated as the game it actually is.

Reflecting on "Cure" and Kurosawa's other similarly open-ended stories, I can't imagine that these films ending any way other than with a series of question marks. They certainly wouldn't be improved by narrative simplicity or closure. This would, in fact, be a violation of their themes. If audiences would stop whining, "hey, I don't get it!" long enough to consider the possibilities that are being suggested by such ambiguities, they might find that they make valid emotional or intellectual sense that can't be conveyed with conventional plotting. (The simple events and conclusions of most movies don't occur in life any more than the strangenesses we encounter in films like this one - so when people gripe that it doesn't make sense I can't imagine what they're complaining about. Compared to what?)

The final shot of Todd Haynes' "Safe", for instance, has the emotional force of a ton of bricks for anyone who is beyond the point of being outraged by a deliberate lack of closure. To my mind it was a perfect ending, at just the right moment, for a film that had assumed the agenda of raising more questions than answers - so complaints about it's ambiguity are shocking. Surely this is a sign of some kind of degeneracy, the rejection of movies that require thought on the part of the viewer in order to complete the experience. Isn't it more satisfying to be left with something that isn't entirely over when it's over?

It's plain to see that "Cure" was constructed with great care. None of the lapses in conventional logic are arbitrary or lazy (as is often the case with David Lynch - for good or ill). They each follow a perceptible (building) rhythm and advance one or more frightening and powerful suggestions - which can be perceived by anyone who isn't straitjacketed by simplistic narrative expectations.

Other wonderful films by Kurosawa include "The Serpent's Path", "Seance", and "Kairo (Pulse)." James Cameron fans need not apply.

Rating:
Summary: creepy and disturbing masterpiece
Review: This is a serial killer movie, but unlike any you have ever seen before. Before watching this, you should know a few things:

1) It has been compared to a lot of movies, but any resemblance to any of these other movies is brief and superficial in many cases, as this film charts a course of its own.

2) This film proceeds at a deliberate pace. It takes its time developing the story; viewing it requires patience and constant attention. This is not a movie for the attention-deficit crowd.

3) The movie is one big jigsaw puzzle. Virtually every scene is an important piece of the puzzle, and you have to figure out where it fits in. As I said, it requires constant attention and analysis.

4) The last scene in the restaurant is very important. I am not giving anything away by saying that the main person in this scene does something he has never done before, and that this is an important clue. I am also not giving anything away by saying watch what the person in the background does in the last two seconds before the credits roll, as this is also an important clue. Once you have begun to unravel the secrets of this movie, the rest is easy. It may take two or three viewings before things become clear, but the effort is worth it. This is a movie that really gets under your skin, and the more you figure out what is going on, the creepier it gets.

Rating:
Summary: creepy and disturbing masterpiece
Review: This is a serial killer movie, but unlike any you have ever seen before. Before watching this, you should know a few things:

1) It has been compared to a lot of movies, but any resemblance to any of these other movies is brief and superficial in many cases, as this film charts a course of its own.

2) This film proceeds at a deliberate pace. It takes its time developing the story; viewing it requires patience and constant attention. This is not a movie for the attention-deficit crowd.

3) The movie is one big jigsaw puzzle. Virtually every scene is an important piece of the puzzle, and you have to figure out where it fits in. As I said, it requires constant attention and analysis.

4) The last scene in the restaurant is very important. I am not giving anything away by saying that the main person in this scene does something he has never done before, and that this is an important clue. I am also not giving anything away by saying watch what the person in the background does in the last two seconds before the credits roll, as this is also an important clue. Once you have begun to unravel the secrets of this movie, the rest is easy. It may take two or three viewings before things become clear, but the effort is worth it. This is a movie that really gets under your skin, and the more you figure out what is going on, the creepier it gets.

Rating:
Summary: Is a thriller that isn't fun still categorized a thriller?
Review: This Japanese independent film, I believe, is the only independent film of the summer that I truly disliked. The movie revolves around a serial killer with the power to control minds to do his killing. I might have liked it if it weren't so long and repetitive, (one killing after another with almost no further plot development- not a good thing when dealing with repetition), and maybe had some three dimensional characters. Unfortunately, the gratuitous violence, which I can rarely, but this time, honestly say, is gratuitous, doesn't make up for the movie's lack of energy, rhythm, or characters, not to mention the far-fetched plot that would have required an ounce of creativity to pull off.