Planet Sick-Boy: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"
© Copyright 2001 Planet Sick-Boy. All Rights Reserved.
If you've been wondering whether someone can make a film as moody, atmospheric and downright disturbing as Se7en, you'll want to start pleading with your local arthouse theatres to land Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure. Actually, it's more of a blend of Memento's amnesia, The Manchurian Candidate's mind-control and power of suggestion, and the bent serial killer from the aforementioned Se7en.
Yakusho Koji (Shall We Dance?) plays Detective Kenichi Takabe, a man clearly beaten down from both dealing with his mentally unstable wife and his inability to solve a string of bizarre murders. The victims all have a large "X" carved into their throat and chest, but the killings have an even more bizarre link. The murderers are always found near the crime scene but have no recollection of committing any crime. To make matters worse, they're usually friends and acquaintances of the victims, too.
Enter a peculiar psychology student named Mamiya Kunio (Hagiwara Masato), who might be connected to the murders but suffers from acute amnesia, making him impossible to question as he can't remember anything that happened more than a few minutes ago. Mamiya keeps asking, "Who are you?" over and over again (his memory is much worse than Leonard Shelby's), but is he merely trying to figure out who you are, or is he trying to get you to question your own identity?
Kurosawa, who won an award at Cannes this year for Séance, uses long shots almost exclusively in Cure, which, amazingly, is his first film to be released in the United States. The result makes the film a bit creepier, sort of like you're spying on the characters, which makes everything more realistic. It's one bleak film, and its ending would make Kevin Spacey proud. But if you're the kind of idiot that needs every loose end neatly tied up before the credits roll, you'll want to skip this and see America's Sweethearts again.
1:51 - Not Rated
========== X-RAMR-ID: 28989 X-Language: en X-RT-SourceID: 595 X-RT-AuthorID: 1146
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews