Mom in Movies II

For those of you who will "celebrate" mother's day by being thankful that you got out alive and even remotely sane, I present a reprise of last year's Mother's Day Movie List. You can read the annotated list from last year here.

Last year's movies:
Serial Mom (1994)
Throw Momma From the Train (1987)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Stepford Wives (1975)
I Heart Huckabees (2004)
MirrorMask (2005)

This year's addition is a set of very bad thrillers. I sometimes find very bad psychological thrillers to be entertaining, especially the parent-fear ones. Be prepared. They are very bad. You may need to "gong" if you can't stand them.

Godsend (2004) Thriller/drama/horror (but my recollection is that the attempts at "horror" tended to make me laugh). Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn star as the parents, bad parents? Perhaps. But aren't we all? I mean, with the need to focus on career and live in a big city, it's small wonder they aren't as dedicated to their son, Adam, as they should have been. Thus, their son dies - tragically on his eighth birthday. Soon after, mom and dad are approached by a shadowy fertility doctor (played by DeNiro - wow) who offers the chance to clone their child Adam. Things look ok with Adam (v2), until he turns eight! (themes: technophobia, cloning = dividing the soul, bad parents who are punished for not being parental, a "look what happens to bad parents" movie).

Half Light (2006) Thriller/drama/horror. Demi Moore does Lifetime. Successful writer Rachel (Moore) sends her son out to play while she works. Out where we have been shown a canal and a gate with a lock on it. Hours later (we presume), after Rachel has spent too much time writing, arguing with her chilly boyfriend, and making a suptuous dinner in her gorgeous designer kitchen, she remembers that she sent her son out with the promise she'd be out soon. HORRORS!!!! The tyke has met a rather Freudian end. Mom mourns for a scene and a half I think. She eventually sets out to the middle of frikkin nowhere - Scotland or something - to mourn somewhere else? To finish her novel? To stand on a porch in a fisherman's sweater, cradling a mug of coffee in her hands as the wind from the bay whips her hair into a dark cloud around her face....ooohhhh, it's so spooky and romantic! Guilt, ghosts, and maybe a little nooky follow.

Blessed (2004) Thriller/drama/horror. It's another fertility clinic gone bad movie. This one was very Rosemary's baby. Heather Graham plays the barren mom. IMDB's review says the couple can't afford fertility treatments - I don't recall that but it may well have been the case. That makes it better in fact. A little gross in parts if I remember, but overall the kind of bad horror movie you can watch with your finger on the pause button so you can stop to laugh or to discuss the true horror - the fucked up gender themes which are highlighted in movies like this.

To wash it down, I recommend Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (1977). It's a tribute to Hitchcock - which of course means a parody of Hitchcock. The connection between High Anxiety and the parent/mother themed movies is not necessarily obvious and when it does come in explicitly it is sort of an appendix, silly Brooks-styled punchline and all. However, it's a funny movie which is more funny if you like Hitchcock or classic detective/mystery movies. Worthwhile if for no other reason than to see Madeline Kahn's amazing Hitchcock heroine.