The Sum Of It All

Madeo (Mother), originally uploaded by RumAli.

I attended the 2010 Wisconsin Film Festival this past weekend, seeing four movies, including two feature length films. One of the films was the highly anticipated The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. There were over 1500 people in the Orpheum Theater for that film, which, I felt, was a solid, if conventional, thriller. The movie that will stay with me is Joon-ho Bong’s latest film, Mother. It shares the same “who’s the killer?” question as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Mother completely defies convention, and easily tops my meager list of feature length movies seen in a theater this year.

1. Mother
2. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
3. Hot Tub Time Machine

While there are some predictable parts in Mother, there is some editing and acting near the end that put an exclamation point on the climax. Or an asterisk that seems to say “Not only is this going to happen but here’s something fundamental about the characters’ relationships that is also pretty sad and maybe fatalistic.”