koji yakusho

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Our second film in this year’s Foreign Film February is a Japanese legal thriller that starts out strong but quickly gets muddled and ultimately wound up kind of boring me.

In the opening scene, we see a man bludgeon another man to death and then set him on fire. Then the film moves forward in time with the killer, Misumi Takashi (Kōji Yakusho) under arrest and being questioned by his defense attorneys.

He fully admits to killing the man but his story regularly changes in regards to what actually happened and why he did it. His attorneys argue over the best way to defend their client and keep him from being executed.

The devil, they say, is in the details, and while there are a lot of details in this film, I had a difficult time caring about them. This is a film that makes quite a to-do over whether he should be charged with Robbery-Murder or Murder-Robbery. The difference being in his intentions. If his intentions were robbery and the murder came after then his motive is greed, but if he murdered him for some other emotional reason (such as anger over being fired – for the dead man was his boss) and robbed him afterward then the jury might be more sympathetic.

That’s an important legal distinction, I guess, but not one that makes for compelling cinema.

It is well-acted and well made and some of the revelations are interesting, but overall I found myself ready for it to be over long before it actually was.

cure movie poster

Unlike previous Friday nights, I’ve actually sat through tonight’s entire Horror Movie before writing this post. Theoretically, this means I can actually write a review of it now, instead of making vague promises to tell you what I think of it tomorrow (and then forgetting to actually do so). In reality, it is late, and I am tired, and my brain cannot think of anything to say about it.

Briefly, the plot involves a series of grisly murders being committed by seemingly ordinary people. There is a detective (Kôji Yakusho) trying to understand why this is happening, and an amnesiac (Masato Hagiwara) who may be hypnotizing them into doing it.

The plot is, at times, a bit silly and it is a whole lot enigmatic, but the director Kiyoshi Kurosawa fills it with atmosphere and mood. It is all about the vibe of the film more than the actual plot. I really quite loved it.