A real hit at the AFI film festival a while back was a Korean film called Mother, directed by Joon-ho Bong, which didn’t get released into theaters here until last year.
Well… for whatever reason, people have been talking about it again lately, so some friends and I decided we might as well get around to watching it. While it wasn’t without some charms, I certainly don’t understand the excessive amounts of praise that people continue to heap upon it. It senselessly combined bits and pieces of various genre-types without ever really cohering into anything that felt worthwhile; merely pastiche. Pastiche with lots of creepy incest. Not that it was a terrible movie; certainly better than something like Black Swan, and since Black Swan appears to be the best movie that was released last year, I guess maybe I can see why people liked Mother so much, and yet…. The end was abominable.
Clay Dean and Tuni Chatterji presented a program of their films at the Echo Park Film Center, with the title ‘(Un)Related Films by Lovers’. Despite the fact that their respective bodies of work have seemingly little to do with one another, the work cohered into a wonderful program.
Of Dean’s films, a real standout was Realms of Vision I. Edited in-camera, the film was comprised primarily of single-frames or short bursts of film showing piles of rocks, variously covered with lichens and moss or bare, shades of different colors. Beginning with more recognizable forms with a clear spatial depth to them, it gradually evolved into mostly close-ups of just the surfaces alone, so that the rapid images melded together into what, at times, looked like television static, coming in and out of focus, with different colors coming to predominate over others at a time, then receding.
Of Chatterji’s two films on the program, Twitterpated, her “experimental musical”, was just delightful. Featuring a variety of people singing love songs mostly a cappella with the ambient sounds of their environment, it was a really joyful way of dealing with the impulse to sing songs of love.