The Grey (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (16)

A movie about the survivors of a plane crash in the remote icy wilderness with bleak hopes for rescue sounds like something you've seen before? Well, yes and no. The Grey gets its name from a pack of wolves (I guess they're grey wolves... I'll have to check with Sarah Palin to know exactly) who live in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. So aside from all the other stuff about starvation, frigid temperatures and random cuts and bruises, the lucky men who don't die on impact have to figure out how to get rescued without being eaten by an angry bunch of wolves. Sounds tough.

Liam Neeson plays Ottway, an Irish gun-for-hire who is employed by an oil company to shoot the wolves that live near the oil drilling operation in northern Alaska. He's upset that he's lost his wife months before and is about to shoot himself in the face (happy story!), when he decides not to, but rather to to fly home instead. That ill-fated flight then crashes leaving only seven men alive (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts). They soon realize that a pack of wolves is hunting them so they have to move from the wreckage to have a chance at not being eaten. As the trek along the Alaskan backwoods their odds get slimmer as they realize they are very well outnumbered by the animals.

This is a fun movie, though not a particularly brilliant one. It certainly plays some of the Val Lewton games where you hear noises but don't know if they're wind or wolf howls. It's all very unsettling and a bit eerie, even though there's nothing really magical about the wolves... they're just hungry.

I always appreciate a movie with a good elliptical ending, and this has one. It's a bleak story that is told efficiently, if sentimentally (I really don't care about Ottway's back-story; when we find out what it is, it doesn't change anything because he's still being hunted by wild animals), and has a cool look to it with lots of sequences set at night and in blizzard conditions. Writer/director Joe Carnahan has done better work in the past (like Narc, which is great), but this is still solid and fun.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Wednesday, November 30, 2011) (108)

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a movie by Lynne Ramsey based on a novel by Lionel Schriver. I haven't read the book, and that might have been a problem for my appreciation and understanding of the emotional and psychological narrative of the film. Boiled down to it's core, the movie is about a cold, clinical woman, Eva (Tilda Swinton), for whom motherhood is probably a bit of a stretch. When she and her husband, Franklin (John C. Reilly), have a son, Kevin, and move to the suburbs, she has a tremendous difficulty connecting with the child.

It seems that baby Kevin is very willful and very hard to control. Eva spends her days with the baby constantly trying to engage and connect with him, but to no avail. At a point she thinks (we think) he might be autistic, though the doctors say he's totally healthy. As he grows up to be a young child, he becomes more and more willful and self-possessed, being a total terror for his mother and an angel for his father. The story continues to unwind as we see Eva struggle more and more with her son with whom she doesn't connect.

This is basically an update of The Bad Seed (which is a fun, but terrible film), or any of the dozens of books and films that continued that idea (Orphan, Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child). With all of those works, there's always a question of "nature vs. nurture". Is it that the kid is just rotten to his core and a hopeless case or is he a product of his cold upbringing? Ramsey deals with that dilemma here, though I don't think there is anything more than that chestnut.

It is a very beautiful film to watch. Ramsey does a masterful job creating an incredibly cold tone to the story and atmosphere. The modern suburban house the family moves into has few decorations and is mostly white and angular. The camera doesn't move much and, when it does, it is very slow, so everything feels restrained and uncomfortable. Ramsey does use lots and lots (and lots and lots and lots) of red in the film. Clearly this is a visual clue into the the bloodiness the boy (or the mother) has in him, but it's a bit too obtuse for me. Still, there are some lovely images that come out of this icy setting with bolts of passionate color.

Ramsey also seems very interested with sound effects, soundtrack and score. Scenes transition with sound effects that lead us from one moment to another, frequently featuring uncomfortable sounds like scratching and sirens. I think this is an interesting way of creating a world in our minds of unexpectedness and discomfort that never lets us rest in the back of our seats. (I was very disappointed with one scene involving a guinea pig where Ramsey pulled her punches and didn't use the aural as well as she could have. Alas.)

I think the biggest problem for me is that I had trouble understanding the psychology of Eva, which, I would imagine, is better spelled out in the book. I worry that Ramsey and co-adapter Rory Kinnear are very familiar with the anguish of Eva from the novel, but just didn't put much of it on screen, or simply used a shorthand for big swaths of background. It's clear that Eva is a cold person, but not clear why or how she transfers that to her son. Considering this would normally be thought of as a "psychodrama," without the psychological aspect shining through more clearly, it really is just reduced to a campy melodrama (not that there's anything wrong with melodrama - they're just less psychologically engaging for the audience... by design).

Ramsey is clearly a talented director, though I would be interested to see her direct this film with a different script. I appreciate the offensive and brutal sense of humor peppered throughout the work, such as Kevin eating a lychee right after his sister is fitted with a glass eye or him barely flinching and then staring at his mother after she accidentally walks in on him while he's masturbating. This is a good movie buried in a tired story. I don't really need to see another Bad Seed and that's really all that this movie is. It's a very pretty and clever version of the story, but it's not much more than that story.

Stars: 2 of 4

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 (Friday, November 25, 2011) (107)

What is there to say about Twilight Part 4 Part 1? It's a movie about vampyres who fuck teens, but only after their married in special Mormon ways. Then it's about how those teens get preggers with monster babies (hello, Rosemary!) who eat them from the inside out. Then there are some werewolves who want to kill the vampyre family because they're really a cult (they are!) and broke the hymen of that teeny girl. Then the teen girl gets all rexy and gray-green-toned. Then one of the wolves decides to fight his brother dawgs because he really likes skinny girls, even tho she's a fang-banger.

Somewhere in there there's a lot of really bad acting. I don't know what you call what K-Stew, R-Patz and Tay-Lau are doing onscreen, but it's ain't acting. They each have reach the bottom of their tanks and are just saying words and looking sweaty. I hope none of them is still doing that stuff in ten years.

Bill Condon has a great inside joke in one scene where people are watching the Bride of Frankenstein, which is a film directed by James Whale, a homosexual and the subject of a biopic he made a few years ago. That split-second moment was the best part of this movie.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Roommate (Sunday, February 13, 2011) (5)

I was desperately hoping that The Roommate would be an amazingly trashy and hilarious psycho-sexual thriller weighted heavily to the shity and teen-set. It has all the makings of an amazing movie: two stars of teeny soaps (albeit pure pulp and the other an elevated drama dealing with teens), Leighton Meester (from Gossip Girl) and Minka Kelly (from Friday Night Lights and Derek Jeter's arm... which is not a TV show); a plot that sorta resembles Barbet Shroeder's Single White Female; and the fact that they two stars look almost identical. (OK - I should say that these two look so much alike that it was sometimes hard to remember which one was which. I think this is amazing and hilarious. They might be the same person with slightly different makeup.)

I was hoping for some bad, melodramatic dialogue, some hot lesbian sex (for no reason other than that such a dumb movie with identical-looking actresses is screaming for them to make out, like in Wild Things with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards), and some bad ketchupy bloody violence. Alas, I got none of that. This movie is a total dud and when I was hoping for some sort of dumb fun, I just got a really, really bad movie with nothing going for it.

As the film opens, we see Sara (Kelly) checking into her dorm at her LA university. A bit later she meets her new roommate, Rebbecca (Meester). They become best friends, but some of the other girls in the dorm don't like Rebbecca because she's a bitch to them. Sara meets some douchebag at a frat party, Stephen, and they start to date. Rebbecca keeps to her bed in the room.

She becomes more and more possessive of Sara, ultimately telling one of the other girls on the hall that she will kill her if she doesn't stop being Sara's friend (that happens all the time in the shower in dorms). Then they go to Beverly Hills (as if girls going to school in Westwood, say, wouldn't have found their way to Beverly Hills before November). When they go to Rebecca's house, Sara realizes that she has a weird relationship with her folks (how strange!) and her mother says something about how she suffers from bi-polar disorder and is on meds.

Apparently this is fucking scary as hell to Sara, who comes from somewhere in the middle of the country. A roommate on meds?! Holy fucking fuck! She has to move out right away. Once she tries to push Rebbecca away, hell breaks lose and Rebbecca kills some people in a very boring way. Oh - and Billy Zane is in this as some letchy art prof... I'm glad the brother is acting again! (He's the fucking worst!)

There is so much wrong with this movie it's hard to pinpoint what is the most upsetting thing. I know I hated the fact that Sara is so dumb and doesn't think Rebbecca is fucking nuts until she finds out she's bi-polar - and then shit suddenly gets bad. Like, there are tons and tons of people in the world who are bi-polar... I think it's just lazy. (And not so say the Shroeder piece was a brilliant picture, but at least the suggestion of borderline personality disorder is more interesting than violent bi-polarity. And if we really want to get into it, we don't really see anything bi-polar as much as we see psychopathology and some possible schitzophrenia. Again, I'm being paid more here than the psych advisers for the film.)

Considering both actresses look basically like the same person, I was surprised that Meester did such a better job than Kelly. Kelly's voice really annoys me. She speaks mostly in a baby-talky light and airyness and never enunciates or finishes words (which I thought was lesson one in acting... at least it was when I was in 5th grade). She's mostly overdone and telegraphs her emotions too far (I'm going to do a sad face, because my character is sad in this scene). Meester is actually pretty good here (in a terrible role). I'm impressed by her so far (she was also pretty good in Country Strong).

This is a movie to avoid at all cost. There is nothing in it at all. It's ridiculous and boring, not really funny (to laugh at, I mean) and much more work than it should be.

Stars: 0 of 4

The Housemaid (Saturday, January 22, 2011) (3)

The Housemaid is a weird movie. I have come to expect from contemporary Korean films that the directors sometimes like to shock and surprise us, but this movie takes that idea and really runs with it. At times I felt like writer-director Im Sang-Soo was telling an interesting psycho-sexual drama and at time it felt like he was poking fun at us for thinking it was serious, while he made a silly drama similar to a soft-core porno you'd see on late night cable. This isn't to suggest the film is pornographic, but the dramatic plot line was silly and forced throughout.

Hoon and his wife Haera are super rich and have a gigantic house. They have one old housekeeper, Nami, and are looking to hire an assistant for her to help with things around the house. They find Eun-yi, a young woman, and hire her to help out taking care of their young daughter and do smaller tasks like taking food and wine to different parts of the home (because when you're rich you hire people to do that for you). In a short time Eun-yi and Hoon are having an affair. Nami, never happy with her young assistant, finds out about the affair and tries to let Haera know about it in the most dignified way possible. All hell breaks lose when Eun-yi gets pregnant and Nami and Haera's plans crumble as Korean family pride (and blackmail) becomes more important than anything else.

One thing that Sang-Soo does very well here is that he creates a beautiful world of unparalleled luxury with gigantic spaces (in the enormous home) decorated in the finest woods and marbles. The interiors are sumptuous and the costumes work with them beautifully. At times I was reminded of the richness of the rooms and spaces in Luca Guadagnino's recent I Am Love. At time same time, though, there is a coldness and antiseptic quality to the cleanness of everything - which, of course is important here as we realize this rich family is much more superficial, fragile and even toxic than we had originally thought.

There has been a recent trend in the past few years of movies about maids (well, maybe it even goes back to Mary Poppins) and how powerful and manipulative a force they can be. They are like domineering mothers, but are not part of the family and are paid to be there, or not be there. They know all that goes on in their houses, generally don't meddle with the family business, but can find out important information by simply doing their normal job. In many ways Nami is reminiscent of Catalina Saavedra's maid character in Sebastian Silva's The Maid. She wants to be part of the family and thinks of herself as such, she's reluctant to admit she needs help and is such a master of the home that she knows how to control people who step foot in it.

This film is about how maids have become Freudian nightmares. They are motherly and caring (assuming you pay them), but also can be sexual or sexually threatening. They are uber-mothers - not part of the family (and you can have sex with them if you want), but are hard to get rid of if you don't like them.

The finale of this film goes much too far and involves flames and high-wire hijinks (almost literally). It is a shame this happens as there is a lot of interesting stuff to go through in the film about male-female relationships and the cost of companionship and love. Sang-soo goes for a rather big, cheap spectacle at the end (and throughout, really) and undermines the good stuff that we saw before. This is a shame because this could have been a very interesting and beautiful film otherwise.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Black Swan (Saturday, December 4, 2010) (152)

Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan is not at all the film that I expected it to be (I guess that's why you go to the movies...). I was thinking it was a rivalry story of two young women, one on top and one as up-and-comer who are fighting for dominance. This is not really that at all.

The story revolves around Nina (Natalie Portman), a humorless young dancer in a New York City ballet company. She has been stuck in the middle or high middle of the troupe for a few years and is trying to catch her big break. She lives with her very over-protective mother... oh, and she's fucking nuts. She has hallucinations from very early on in the film, some are bloody, most are shocking. She ignores these visions and tries to continue on with her life.

As the new season is about to open the director of the company Thomas (pronounced "Tow-maaahhh", of course) (Vincent Cassel) announces that the show they will be doing is Swan Lake... but that he has some new ideas for it (or something). Nina main rival in the auditions is Lily (Mila Kunis) a hot new dancer who came to New York from San Francisco (how mysterious!).

Nina gets the role, but struggles with the emotions and sexuality that Thomas wants her to put into the role, because she is such an uptight drone. He shows her Lily dancing and says she should be more sexual like she is. Mostly from this point, we see Nina struggling with her slow decent into deep schizophrenia. She sees scary things jump out at her and speak to her, she sees herself growing wings or something, she sees herself having a lesbian tryst. She struggles sorta with a rivalry with Lily, but this is never really fully fleshed-out.

The film is basically about a girl going from pretty crazy and very tightly wound to more crazy and more tightly wound. There isn't a lot of development. She's never really warm or very interesting and never totally sane. This isn't really an interesting character development or plot. The dancing stuff is just the frame around the psycho-drama - it's not really about dancing at all. She could be a college student or a girl with a job on Wall Street. Mostly the dancing is just showy and an excuse to see Natalie in tight clothes (which is kinda gross when she so super skinny).

But this isn't really a psycho-drama in the sense of Bergman's Personal or Hour of the Wolf. This isn't about how she's going from sane to insane or how she's insane and doesn't know it, but we know it. This is about a girl who knows well that she's crazy and denies it. The only sorta inverse dramatic irony that Aronofsky gives us is that she knows she's crazy and we don't know until the third scene of the first act (and, by the way, that reveal is way too early). That's not interesting.

Why couldn't Nina have been a girl in the job of her dreams struggling physically with the work, but fighting to make it right who slowly goes crazy? I guess that would be more banal, but it would have worked better as an interesting narrative.

Aronofsky's aesthetic is totally lazy here. Everything is cold and dark (get it?!) and moving between lots of white and lots of black (get it?!). He also uses a shit-ton of mirrors to remind us of the duality of life and the split in Nina's psychology. It's so fucking heavy handed it's hard to watch. I would like this if it was a bit more Brechtian - and he was commenting on the dullness and heavy-handedness of the style. Instead we get nothing but earnest triteness. (N.B. This is not an arch attempt at farce or sarcasm, the way Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls or Starship Troopers were. There is no evidence to suggest Aronofsky is anything but totally serious about what he's presenting to us. If there's a wink in there, it's invisible. If this is a joke, it failed miserably.)

There is also a lot of waste, excess and fat in the script and some really horrible dialogue. One of the sub-stories here is that there is an older dancer, Beth (Winona Ryder), who is near the end of her career and struggling with addiction, depression and the loss of her physical talents. She tries to commit suicide (off-screen, so we don't really give a shit) and ends up in the hospital. There's a thing where Nina is so in love with her dancing, that she steals small things from her (a lipstick, a pack of cigarettes). I think this is supposed to mean something deep, but it just comes off as silly waste. This thread is never developed much and doesn't really connect to Nina's own psychology (she might be schizto, but she's also a lover of art! Who cares?!).

Considering the film is from Nina's point of view, and it is well established that her view is sick and not true, most of what we see onscreen is questionable and hard -to-believe. We cannot say that anything really happens or anyone really exists. I have strong feelings that the whole Lily character is just a figment of Nina's psychosis and doesn't exist. We only see her when Lily sees her and she seems to be a total psycho foil for her. She also, curiously, doesn't have a last name, when all other characters do. This is sorta interesting, but not really. It doesn't add anything to the story, but is just a flashy tidbit.

What Aronofsky lacks in intrigue, he makes up for in cheap surprises and gags. If a character turns around, odds are there's someone spooky lurking behind her. BOO! This is not filmmaking. This is simple and works the same when your 6-years old as when your and adult. This doesn't make me feel any different about Nina or her situation.

I should say that the Black Swan dance sequence at the end of the film is actually remarkably well done, very cinematic and beautiful. Well done on that part, Darren.

I think this story was simply badly conceived. I think it is a piece that could conceivably look nice (although I wasn't moved by the look), but the story and script were messy and it never was able to get over that. The acting is very OK (Cassel is terrible, Kunis is forgettable for the 20 minutes she's onscreen, Portman didn't have much to work with). This is a bad movie.

Stars: .5 of 4

127 Hours (Tuesday, November 9, 2010) (147)

Based on Aron Ralston's book about his crazy experience bouldering in Utah, 127 Hours is a totally grizzly story that is certainly not for all audiences.

Ralston is a twenty-something kid who loves to go bouldering, canyoning and exploring the wilderness of Utah. One day he goes into Blue John Canyon and ends up falling into a gorge with a boulder on top of his arm. As he struggles with the rock, he comes to the conclusion (after about 100 hours) that his only option is to break his arm off to get free.

Ralston is played here by James Franco, who does a really wonderful job with the role. Franco is fun and fresh with a bright smile always on his face and a can-do attitude with everything (including his own arm amputation). We see the flakiness of Ralston that leads him to not tell his friends and family where he is going and when he'll be back and not bring a good pocket knife (had he only known he would need it later...).

Director and co-writer Danny Boyle does a very nice job showing what is mostly a one-man show here, considering Franco is alone on screen for at least 75 minutes. The film doesn't really get boring and Boyle uses flashbacks effectively and Ralston's imagination very well.

One annoying thing is a pretty terrible epilogue that Boyle adds at the of the movie. We see that Raltson now leads a happy life with his wife and a kid. This is silly and beats us over the head with the fact that it's a true story (which it clearly is, no?). I dunno - I feel like part of watching a movie is to see an actor playing a role and interpreting a character. To then see the real guy at the end is frustrating (because it undermines Franco's performance) and not necessary at all.

This is a small movie, one I would call lesser Boyle. It has a good score by A.R. Rahman (who did the score for Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire) and a script co-written by Boyle and past collaborator Simon Beaufoy. It's a nice film, but not brilliant.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Buried (Saturday, September 25, 2010) (121)

Rodrigo Cortes' Buried is a great example of a tremendous idea that is terrible executed and how the end result is pretty horrible. The film opens with a black screen and a some panting and fumbling from a man. After a few agonizing minutes (it might actually only be a few seconds, but it feels like it's going on forever) a Zippo lighter is lit and we see a man (Ryan Reynolds) who is tied bound and gagged in a shallow coffin, dirty and bleeding. He screams and tries to push is way out, but he seems to be buried under sand.

After a few minutes a mobile phone rings near his feet. He reaches down to grab it and misses the call. He begins calling numbers he knows: his wife in Western Michigan; 411 information; the FBI field office; the company he works for. He is a contractor in Iraq, a truck driver, and it seems that his convoy was hit by an IUD. He blacked and and all he knows is that now he is where he is. (We find out later that it is October 2006.)

Ultimately he gets a call from the kidnappers who tell him they need $5million by 9pm or they will let him die in the coffin. It is about 7:30 at this point. He calls the State Department and they put him through to a hostage negotiating team in Iraq and a guy who can help to find him or at least try to calm his nerves. It seems he's not only running out of time on the clock, but his phone is running out of batteries and he might also be running out of air.

The premise is great and sorta reminiscent of a clumsy Hitchcockian idea (actually the poster and the opening titles are clearly inspired by Saul Bass and give a very Hitchcockian feeling even before the film begins). But the execution of the film is nothing even close to Hitch. At nearly every turn Cortes makes bad decisions and goes more for the shock/thriller aspect of the story than the interesting psycho-terror-drama aspects of the story that Hitch would have certainly enjoyed more. Basically the script is full of cheap gags and a bunch of unexplainable details.

At one point Reynolds is told by the hostage helper guy that he should conserve his phone battery life by putting the phone on a sound ringer rather than a vibrate. He doesn't do this- and for no particular reason. Later he takes a brief nap and wakes to find a black snake in his pants. Huh?! How did a snake get in his pants? We see the snake slither out of a hole in the side of the coffin (a hole that was never there before) - so are we to believe that the snake came into the box, found the leg of his trousers, went up one side and then down the other side and then out the hole again? Smart snake!

I am impressed that the entire film takes place inside the coffin with the camera only on Reynolds for 95 minutes and doesn't get particularly dull, but this feeling is tempered by the absolute idiocy of most of the writing. Reynolds frequently gets furious and yells a people he calls when they don't understand the situation he's in. I totally get that he's frustrated and panicky, but at some point shouldn't he figure out that he can get more help if he's calm than if he's worked up?

I would love to see this done again with a better script. Screenwriter Chris Sparling clearly has horror movies on his mind more than good suspense films and I think this does the film a disservice. I know this concept can be done better.

Stars: 1 of 4

Birdemic: Shock and Terror (Saturday, July 31, 2010) (86)

Birdemic is one of the worst movies ever made. It might be the worst movie I've ever seen in my life. Everything about it is terrible from the story and the script, to the acting, the editing, the sound and the special effects. There is no reason in the world to watch this film, and yet it was one of the most enjoyable movie-watching experiences I can remember in a long time.

In a recent piece in Harper's, Tom Bissell wrote about the film The Room as what he called a "post-camp cult film." That's the best description of Birdemic I can find. "It's so bad that it's good" is the general force at work here. Bissell beautifully explains the film as the "movie that an alien who has never seen a movie might make after having had movies thoroughly explained to him."

To describe the story that director James Nguyen wrote and directed is sorta silly, but I feel formally obliged to do it here. Rod works for an Internet sales company and one day bumps into hottie Nathalie in a diner at lunch. He asks her out and she says yes. They go out and fall in love.

At some point, totally unrelated to the romance, a flock of killer eagles begins attacking people in the Bay Area and killing them. Rod and Nathalie have to escape the terror from above and kill as many of the birds as they can in the process. Not to ruin anything (not that it matters if you know), but the birds ultimately give up and fly away for no reason. There's really no shock or terror in this at all.

The film is basically a re-hash of M. Night Shyamalan's terrible work from 2008, The Happening. In that, there was something weird where nature was killing people with wind and trees. In this, it seems nature is mad a humans for being bad to the environment, so it sends mad eagles to get the people. (By the way, if there was ever evidence that Shyamalan was a terrible writer and director it is that this movie - which is totally ridiculous - borrows the entire story, including small details, and it comes out totally silly.)

It it hard to explain how terrible every aspect of this film is. Aside from the silly story, every other technical aspect of the film is bad. The acting is beyond wooden (I'm guessing these are non-actors and maybe just Nguyen's friends), the editing is terrible, frequently cutting scenes off before they are finished. The sound is even horrible, cutting in an out as actors are speaking and leaving gaps of silence between visual cuts.

Maybe what makes the film so deliciously horrible is the special effect birds we see throughout the film. They look like birds you might have seen on a computer screen saver from around 1989. They don't move much and seem to hover in the air flapping their wings slowly, like giant, slow humming birds. Some of them are able to hang in the air without moving their wings, as if they were soaring, but also remain still as they do it. They are totally ridiculous and over-the-top.

It seems that this film, which was released in New York this past March, is already a cult hit. I saw it at a midnight screening where the audience was there to see something horrible and knew what they were getting (some of them might have seen it before, as they seemed to be laughing in advance of terrible things happening).

I'm not sure this would play well watching soberly in one's home. It's a bit like a really bad Rocky Horror Picture Show (there's even an amazing musical scene in a bar with a guy singing solo - though he apparently has invisible back-up singers and band). It looks like Nguyen is already working on a sequel to this film (The Resurrection). I look forward to that.

Stars: 0 of 4 (or alternatively "A Billion Stars")

Mother (Sunday, March 28th, 2010) (25)

I am a big fan of South Korean director Joon-ho Bong most well known film, The Host. It is a monster movie in the tradition of the great B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s, like Godzilla or Mothra, but is silly, self-aware, moral and very down-to-earth. Because of this, I was very excited to see his new film, Mother.

This is a Hitchcockian murder mystery based around a guy, Do-joon, who is autistic. He has a small group of friends in the rural town setting and they treat him like anyone else. One night when walking home from the bar he discovers the body of a girl who has been murdered. Immediately he is the main suspect, but mostly because he's an easy target who can't account for his whereabouts -partly because of his difficulty communicating and partly because he was a bit drunk at the time. His mother and all his friends don't believe he was capable of such a thing and they set out to prove him innocent and find the real killer (with or without police help).

Much like The Host, the tone throughout the film is very silly and over-the-top. People behave in ridiculous ways, launching into long monologues, being very silly when they drink, and using very crude language all the time. The violent scenes are also crazy and super bloody - but with a juvenile gory element to them. At times these aspects are enjoyable and at times they are frustrating. Bong spends so much time setting up the ridiculous, stylized situations that I got annoyed that I was not just able to see what was happening without the zaniness. It is a bit too much style and not enough substance. It is certainly a lot of fun, but just too overdone for my taste.

The eponymous mother character is a bit unhinged and is for me a bit hard to empathize with. She's overbearing and much-too concerned with her special-needs son. She interacts with him as if he was a child - even in his 30s - and seems to go overboard with her reaction to his arrest. I guess, as the title describes, this is the central part of the movie - but it actually felt like a side story and not the main direction. For me, the film is really about this special-needs kid and how he lives and then gets into trouble. That his mother is a mad freak is just a bit unnecessary for me - a hat on top of a hat, if you will.

The ending of the film is pure Hitchcock where it is unclear whether the good guy really wins in the end - or if everybody else loses. I really like these classic elements of the story and script.

Stars 2.5 of 4