{"id":5876,"date":"2009-11-08T22:30:43","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T06:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=5876"},"modified":"2009-11-08T22:30:43","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T06:30:43","slug":"mother-joon-ho-bong-2009-south-korea-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=5876","title":{"rendered":"Mother (Joon-ho Bong, 2009): South Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Brian Livesay<\/a>. Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre during Afi Film Festival 2009.<\/p>\n

\"\"This\u00a0is the first Korean film that I have seen and I was very impressed with the way that it was\u00a0filmed and how well the story came together, as well as the level of acting\u00a0of the\u00a0Mother<\/a><\/em> (Kim Hye-Ja). She did an incredible job portraying\u00a0the overprotective but well-meaning mother in the film.<\/p>\n

The opening scene starts out in a vast and\u00a0ever-expanding wheat field with Kim Hye-Ja, who plays the mother,\u00a0dancing to the opening music.\u00a0She plays an eccentric overbearing mother in the film who, even though,\u00a0can be a bit\u00a0odd at times, still manages to be a very\u00a0likeable\u00a0 character in the film.\u00a0She treats her\u00a0son\u00a0as a child\u00a0who is under 10 years\u00a0of age\u00a0in the film even\u00a0though he is in his twenties. She feeds him (literally), sleeps in the same bed (partly due to their economic situation), and treats him\u00a0with little confidence as far as him\u00a0being able to take care of himself.<\/p>\n

His best friend is a bit of a trouble maker but not that bad of a guy. She chides him about hanging out with him and she asks him if he understands,\u00a0and he says yes mother as he walks out the door. She then\u00a0asks him where he is going\u00a0and he tells her that he is going out\u00a0to\u00a0see this same\u00a0friend. It is this type of casual defiance that allows the audience to laugh and possibly relate to this\u00a0situation that is similiar to\u00a0one that\u00a0a mother\u00a0might be\u00a0dealing with when\u00a0confronting a teenager who is defiant and insistant on doing things their way even though it is against the\u00a0parents will.<\/p>\n

During the film her son gets himself into trouble after a drinking binge where he forgets nearly\u00a0everything that happenned during the previous\u00a0night, but somehow a teenage girl ends up dead along the same\u00a0route that he took home. He is questioned by police and in his defiant and hung-over state, he admits to killing the girl even though he remembers nothing from the previous evening. This infuriates the mother and sends her on a determined mission to find the real killer and prove her sons innocence.<\/p>\n

It is filled with many twists and turns which even brings the Mother to walk through the wheat field that was shown in the opening sequences of the film. She leaves no stone unturned\u00a0resorting to trespassing, theft (of\u00a0the possible murder weapon), kidnapping, and even murder all to help her son.<\/p>\n

During the film she visits her son in jail to see if he has remembered anything and each time she visits he remembers more and more. When her son reveals to her a possible motive that the killer may have had for killing the girl, she begins to worry. \u00a0The film makers do a great job\u00a0at keeping the audience involved in the storyline,\u00a0and giving you just enough information\u00a0to keep you guessing throught the duration of the film.<\/p>\n

During one of her visits, the son reveals that he remembers his mother\u00a0had tried\u00a0to kill him at a young age (5 years old). This causes the mother some\u00a0extreme emotional distress and her\u00a0being an accupuncture specialist,\u00a0offers to jab him in a certain spot that will take away all of his bad memories. He accuses her of trying to kill him again and she storms out of the jail visibly upset. It makes you wonder whether or not she was going to cause his death, or just cause him to lose his memory. At the end of the film you find out which scenario would have occurred, but I will\u00a0leave that\u00a0up to\u00a0the viewer to learn when they watch the film. This is a highly recomended film and I will make a\u00a0deliberate\u00a0attempt to see some of the other films by this director such as “The Host” and “Tokyo” which he co-directed.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Brian Livesay. Viewed at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre during Afi Film Festival 2009. This\u00a0is the first Korean film that I have seen and I was very impressed with the way that it was\u00a0filmed and how well the story came together, as well as the level of acting\u00a0of the\u00a0Mother (Kim Hye-Ja). She did an incredible […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":741,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afi-filmfest-2009","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/741"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}