mother!

The past few years at the cinema haven't been overly kind to me. Years where I regularly went to see somewhere between 100 and 150 films a year at the cinema seem to be quite a long time ago. Some of that is undoubtedly down to how I've changed with age; I'm not as willing as I used to be to risk a couple of hours of my time and/ or £10 just on the possibility that I might like something that has little or no obvious appeal to me (I say this as someone who walked out half an hour into a screening of 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid' when I realised that there really was nothing of interest to someone on their own aged more than 10). But I'm pretty sure the movie industry has changed quite a lot over the last few years too. Truly independent movies appear to have largely disappeared from the cinema circuit and we're now reliant on services like Netflix for anything remotely non-mainstream, which may indeed be (as Christopher Nolan has suggested) the canary in the coalmine predicting the death of the cinema experience.

I was fairly indifferent to 'mother!' when I saw it; there were a lot of things I liked, but equally I found much of the experience beyond the limits of my interests. Even before I'd read interviews with the director, Darren Aronofsky, it was pretty obvious that the movie was designed to be loved or hated and my indifference wasn't meant as some kind of bloody-minded superiority. Nevertheless, I'm pleased that the studio behind the movie has leant into the divisiveness that's met it's release, even if I am somewhat suspicious of their motives (a studio publicly supporting a film with major stars and an important director? Clearly not the latest Uwe Boll release). Having said that, the thing I was most pleased about when I went to see it was, as per Paramount's publicity, that the movie exists at all. I'm just as bored by-the-numbers wannabe blockbusters as anyone else. Everyone's tastes change over the years and mine are no exception. Nowadays I have less interest in spectacle and more in characterisation and strong narratives than I used to and more and more I'm finding that that itch is getting scratched on my TV much more than on my still weekly cinema trips. So seeing movies with ambition and ideas in their heads at the cinema is still a bit of a thrill. Even if I'm not mad about the actual movie itself.