Thursday Movie Picks - Mother-Son relationships

As it was a bank holiday on Monday I completely lost track of time so I write this at 1:30am on the Thursday (even though I have to get up for 7am). I also had to quickly think of five or six choices, I discarded one because it's just too fucked up (in all seriousness, I didn't feel right picking it), discarded another because it's too tenuous as the relationship only goes one way and discarded the other because I was planning to see it this week but never got round to it. You've probably seen two of the films I have chosen, but I hope to raise an aspect of the story in the third choice that doesn't get enough attention. I'm hoping my second choice is a lesser seen film but it probably isn't. Remember to check out Wandering Through the Shelves.

As you are undoubtedly aware the fifth film of the Terminator franchise is released this year, my feelings for it are very mixed. I want to see it but expectations are at rock bottom. The fifth Terminator will never be as good as the second which is the perfect action movie with an interesting and touching relationship between a mother and her trouble maker of a son.

We Need to Talk about Kevin looks at how a relationship of hate between mother and son can lead to the act which Kevin committed days before his sixteenth birthday. It is debatable that the mother had never loved her own son from the very beginning and we get one scene that somewhat proves this in which Eva says 'Mummy was happy before Kevin came along' and the 'love' she showed to the child was forced, unauthentic and not natural as though she never truly loved him but felt as though she had to.

The kid was a manipulative; blackmailing menace (Kevin uses a scar on his arm to have leverage over his mother). Kevin's cheeky grins give off an impression that he is purposely causing his mother's life great strain. Kevin is a quite scary and uneasy character, his little acts of disobedience hint at a much darker side to him (which is revealed in his teenage years) and the menacing Kubrick style stare at his mother obviously resenting the play acting in which his mother is adopting when attempting to communicate with him to get him to respond.

His darker side of his character is often hinted at and Lynne Ramsey drops hints of what is about to occur and as the film approaches its conclusion the tension steadily rises. What makes Kevin's behaviour even the more peculiar is that for his father he is a little angel, so why he is relentlessly torturing his mother? What led this child to such an unspeakable act? Was it the fact he was born a sociopath or was it down to the love his mother never gave to him from the very start of his life?

The Exorcist is best known for being the most iconic and terrifying horror films of all time, but what drives the central conflict in the closest thing the film has to hero is the mother-son relationship between Damien Karras and his mother. Karras feels guilty that he let his mother die, he feels responsible, this guilt plagues him and makes him doubt his faith. Pazuzu, the demon who possess Regan, is very much aware of this and uses this to psychologically damage Karras and effectively throwing the whole exorcism into disarray. It's a relationship that is pivotal to the film.