Ain’t No Cure For MURDER
Posted on | April 19, 2004 at 10:53 pm | Comments Off
Yet another post analyzing the Japanese (live action) film industry…
So this weekend I watched a film called Cure that’s been playing on The Sundance Channel. It’s Japanese, and was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who also directed a movie called Bright Future, which I saw at the Denver International Film Festival some months back. This guy is considered to be one of the bright stars of Japanese cinema these days – his movie Pulse (which I have not seen) is supposedly highly regarded in the horror genre.
Cure is a horror film also, though kind of a slow, stately one. There are moments of gruesomeness and some shock, but mostly it’s a movie that wants you to think and to figure out things for yourself. The plot is that people with no connection to each other are committing horrible murders (usually to people they know/love) and knowing that they did it, but not remembering why. It has something to do with this weird character who seems to have amnesia himself and who wanders around getting these people to reveal their inner selves to him right before they commit the murders.
Now, I have nothing against movies that don’t spell everything out for you (see my tirade against those who didn’t “get” Lost In Translation), and I don’t believe every movie has to hit you over the head with a point. But (to paraphrase TV’s Frank), I believe that movies should have something that happens in them. The Japanese directors really seem to love their long, lingering scenes and discussions between characters which don’t seem to be saying much but whose words are laced with layers and layers of hidden meanings. Well, that’s all well and good, but throw me a frickin’ bone here and give me some idea of what’s going on, so that I can begin to figure it out for myself. I hate having to go read an interview with the director (or listen to a DVD commentary) in order to get some idea of what the whole thing was about. I don’t like feeling that I’ve just wasted two hours watching characters talk in circles and seeing dimly-lit, grimy interiors of present-day buildings that looked like they haven’t changed since the 40s. (What, suddenly they don’t have computers and modern hospitals in Tokyo?)
It’s like Japan is the new France.
And don’t even get me started on Bright Future. Time to go feed my jellyfish.
Latre.
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