Mom Never Dies / 어머니는 죽지 않는다

2007 Korean movie that, again, stars no one mega-popular but with a storyline that is both touching and disturbing.

Choi ho is an aging but famous novelist who sneaks into a cordoned off area of an old town that is soon to experience the destructive affects of a detonation switch in the name of progress.

While the demolition crew and his granddaughter run around trying to find him, he finds his childhood home and immediately slips back in time, reliving his past through a series of vignettes and touching time-line incidences that explain his and his dead mother's personality.

I say disturbing because while I may have misread what I saw and heard, I got the impression he left his mother without a word for more than 30 years because of something as gross as incest - but, I can't verify nor say its for certain.

She was the 'typical' movie/drama mama who lives in a poor neighborhood with a sick husband while doing her best to raise her three children.

The daughter gets preggers and has to leave first, and then the eldest boy gets engaged to a woman above their status, so therefore he's unable to bring her back to the house or take their mother with them, so its the baby boy who is left 'holding the bag' if you will.

She's also the typical, overbearing and smothering Korean mother who lives for her baby and actually shows her jealousy when he becomes involved with a popular girl at college.

She succeeds in scaring away the pretty girl when he invites her to the house for a dinner and mama instead is out in the courtyard preparing the tedious ingredients to make Kimchi.

The pretty girl surprises the mother and her embarrassed boyfriend when she changes into his clothing and proceeds to help with the 'typical' Korean family get-together event.

She then dumps the boy, breaking his heart and leaving him devastated for a time.
It also leads to his decision to walk away from his mother, never to return again.

There's a local man who thinks the old lady is still sexy and wants to get together with her, but she snubs him while awaiting the day when her boy returns to her.

As a mom with a boy, I worried as I watched this one, hoping I'm not, that clinging or insecure about losing him to another woman.
I still can't see him dating, much less getting hitched and bringing new life into the world, but that IS my problem and something I, as a mother, need to work on if I want to see him happy.
He keeps promising to take me with him wherever he goes, offering a room with a view in exchange for babysitting, cleaning, and cooking services, and while I hope it comes to fruition, I know in my heart the reality is less than likely it actually will.

Despite the possibility of my misconception of the underlying message here, I think Mom Never Dies was a good movie, and I recommend it highly as a rainy-day view.