Mother, Among Other Things

I've been pretty negligent with you guys lately, what with the usual distractions and all, so sorry 'bout that. But not really, because there's nothing to be sorry for, except the fact that I've forgotten a lot about what I wanted to say about today's (well, late March/early April's) movie. I was going to skip this one, but in between getting excited for this summer and free time to enjoy movies again and reading coverage of Cannes, I felt the urge to write. The only challenge is that I don't really have anything to say, so my plan for now is to kind of babble for a while until I make some kind of conclusion. Does that sound like a plan? I've had a lot of fleeting ideas lately, but every time I come to post they all fade away. So this'll be my way of trying to lure them back. Cool?

And so, predictably, it's been at least a week since I wrote even that paragraph. Excellent. Revising my ideas a tad, I think that today (and probably for the next few posts until I tire of this tactic) I'll focus less on the actual thing I'm talking about and instead seek to get at a big idea, which today will be Magic in Film. Call it a holdover from a semester spent doing some culture theory and intense literary analysis. So, how does this all relate back to "Mother?" I think that the director, Joon-ho Bong, is one of the most masterful filmmakers of our current time (right now) and capable of creating movies that go way beyond the pretty images/predictable story thing that gets pumped out so frequently these days, which may actually be making audiences devolve and is certainly wasting their time. But that's bile and anger for another day. "The Host," the other movie I saw by Bong, was a really good take on the bigass monster destroys cities genre, with a bunch of nasty messages about the medical profession snuck into the giant tadpole destruction. It was scary and interesting, but it also had cinematic life. There was an atmosphere that went with "The Host" that I can still sort of pull up mentally, having not seen it since theaters, which is (I think) one of the hallmarks of a successful movie: it creates its own world, with its own sights and sounds and presumed-but-inaccessible smells, that you can successfully lose yourself in and that sticks with you for years. Good books (and video games too, you could argue) do this as well: a masterful narrative needs a world to live in, so it creates its own.

All of that is kind of a longwinded approach to the point that "Mother" also has its own world-vibe going on, and it's this Bong-distinctive world-vibe of beautiful images and a slightly haunting story populated by a variety of interesting people. I suppose I could be a bit more insightful if I was Korean, but as an outsider I can only try to identify based on pure human empathy with our characters, a mother and her slightly retarded son. The story is set in motion when the son is accused of murdering a local girl, but the mother is our driving force, a tenacious amateur detective essentially battling a world of people who don't really care. But I'd hardly call this a detective story; it may share many of the conventions (clues, indifferent police chiefs), but "Mother" is really more of a soul-wrenching drama about people struggling to fight the good fight and do what's right (to put it in a simple rhyme). The characters are deep, the story engaging in the fine tradition of quality mysteries, and by the end I was involved to the point where I became truly upset with some of the choices our characters made. But what really sets "Mother" into an orbit of great film is Bong's masterful directorial touch that merges awe-inspiringly beautiful shots to this engaging story. Images of people dancing in fields and rainy dark alleys that achieve this degree of visual poetry need to be experienced to be understood. So that'd be my verdict on "Mother," if you want it straight-out: see this movie. It's not for the faint of heart, but it's really good.

And that, tying it all together, is what Great Film should really do: take a potentially upsetting story and elevate it to one of those universal emotional truths that make the scary/sad stories worthwhile. Because, after all, movies are their own unique brand of storytelling. Instead of the traditional verbal art of yarn-spinning or the beauty of the written word found in books (not to mention all the unique nuances that the specific forms bring to and use to alter the basic fabric of the Story), film is meant to use images as well as words and sound and acting to tell the tale. This creates a very different experience, almost that of viewing another possible permutation of the real world for 90-odd minutes, but has an almost magical quality when successfully pulled off. This would be that quality of film magic, and I think it comes from the otherworldliness of watching a movie. They proceed at stately pace, seem somehow familiar, and yet exist only as a series of film stills and in the imagination. This creates a more visceral experience, but one that must be carefully constructed. So many terrible movies exist and are immediately written off as fake, dreck, unimaginative pieces of Hollywood self-indulgence. But when true mastery comes along, it builds a world slowly, subtly, using elements that we are instantly familiar with (fields, human beings, a little music) to draw us in. And then at some point a switch flips, and we're in the world of that movie, wondering not who the actor is but what the character will do. It's a beautiful feeling, and I think that's what we need more of today: "Casablanca" over "Prince of Persia." There was a time when it seems that more movies were magical in this way instead of strictly commercial, and I think that's what that Cannes coverage inspired in me. There are still people out there making great movies, movies that actually have some of this magic, and they should be treated as the cool gender-neutral-Dudes that they are. Let's see if we can't raise some appreciation for old-school movie awesomeness.

How's that for a welcome back to the blog?