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REVIEW: Madagascar [2005]

2012/05/312014/04/25 Jared Mobarak

“Just smile and wave boys. Smile and wave.” Made as though in opposition to Pixar’s brand of magical storytelling, Dreamworks Animation’s Madagascar ushered in the studio’s want for broader comedy and adolescent appeal. With Shrek, they found a franchise that subverted Disney’s use of fairy tales for cinematic fodder and created a nice hybrid of laughs and story with an underdog hero inside an ugly duckling tale. But after a steady stream of Pixar work including Monsters Inc. and the previous year’s The Incredibles, you have to believe that Dreamworks…

Posterized Propaganda June 2012: Blockbusters Arrive, Creativity Stays Home

2012/05/302014/04/11 Jared Mobarak

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably. Summer is here and the marketing materials look as vapid as the films. Not to say there isn’t a couple gems coming to multiplexes with blockbuster budgets; there simply aren’t…

REVIEW: Snow White and the Huntsman [2012]

2012/05/292014/04/25 Jared Mobarak

“Have I not given you all?” What happens when a fairy tale depicting an innocent princess saved by a litany of characters on her way to the crown turns into an epic battle with heroine in full armor storming the castle herself? Well, we discover just how flimsy a character the titular Snow White actually is. A prisoner for years while an evil queen brought darkness upon her kingdom, the young girl’s escape into the hallucinogenic Dark Forest proves nothing but a sense of survival. She has no skills at…

DESIGN: Rochester Broadway Theatre League 2011/2012 Season

2012/05/282012/08/07 Jared Mobarak

2011/2012 Rochester Broadway Theatre League 2011/2012 Season, published by Buffalo Spree Publishing, Inc. Each performance at the Auditorium Theatre, on behalf of RBTL, has imagery and production notes supplied from the traveling company. The new season programs are based from the previous year without any major design changes.

REVIEW: Los cronocrímenes [Timecrimes] [2008]

2012/05/252014/04/25 Jared Mobarak

“No one knows our phone number” All he had to do was stay hidden for an hour, biding time away from sight as his impossible doppelganger went through the same motions of an hour earlier. The ramifications of time travel would have been erased; the insane crippling fear of seeing another man identical to him kissing his wife goodbye a distant memory. But curiosity proves too much as the strangeness leading him to the time portal in the first place was too odd to simply hope it would happen again.…

DESIGN: Twin Peaks – The Black Lodge

2012/05/252012/07/27 Jared Mobarak

Titled “The Birds Sing a Pretty Song”, any fan of the show “Twin Peaks” should be intimately familiar with the Black Lodge. Looking to create an identity/logo that mimicked hotel/lodging locales, I took the obvious jagged striped pattern from the Man From Another Place’s room and attached it to one of the unique lamps bookending the couch residing at its center. Adding the tag “There’s always music in the air” puts the final touch on the graphical representation of the surreal land threatening to consume Special Agent Dale Cooper. Available…

REVIEW: 7:35 de la mañana [7:35 in the Morning] [2004]

2012/05/232014/04/25 Jared Mobarak

“Always in a hurry; always at the same time” An Oscar nominee for Best Live Action Short with his debut work, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo has gone on to make a couple features with festival appeal in the almost decade since. But there is something peculiar, unique, and a bit demented about 7:35 de la mañana [7:35 in the Morning] that makes it the film I will always associate with him. A crazy musical shown to me by a coworker two years after its release, the darkly comic subject isn’t easy…

REVIEW: Men in Black 3 [2012]

2012/05/222016/02/22 Jared Mobarak

“He didn’t say please” While strange for a Men in Black film to open with something other than a crashing spaceship, I’ll admit to being ecstatic for the alternative. Having the sexy Nicole Scherzinger lead us into the maximum-security prison housing one of the universe’s most notorious criminals definitely didn’t hurt either. What I really enjoyed about the pre-credit sequence to Men in Black 3, however, was that our introduction to Bogladite destroyer Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) seemed to get the series back on track as far as giving…

REVIEW: Men in Black II [2002]

2012/05/212014/05/14 Jared Mobarak

“I see you neuralyzed another partner” There’s nothing like a lost memory trope to allow lazy screenwriters the opportunity to explain their film within the construct of its plot. Despite an inventive, tongue-in-cheek reenactment program hosted by Peter Graves about mysterious conspiracy stories ushering us back into the Men in Black universe, Robert Gordon and Barry Fanaro‘s subversion of their expository prologue is wasted. No one enjoys disembodied voices and scrolling text to describe backstory in a Kindergarten teacher’s tone of superiority, so why not poke some fun at the…

REVIEW: Men in Black [1997]

2012/05/172014/05/14 Jared Mobarak

“May I ask why you felt little Tiffany had to die?” Fresh off the success of Get Shorty two years prior, director Barry Sonnenfeld‘s still young but effective career found it’s biggest hit in the rollicking science fiction comedy Men in Black. Unfortunately for him, the film also proved to be his last cinematic work worthy of note after a solid Hollywood journey beginning behind the lens for Rob Reiner, Penny Marshall, and the Coen Brothers. Broader in his comic sensibilities than that more subversive duo, his handling of Ed…

REVIEW: Battleship [2012]

2012/05/152014/05/14 Jared Mobarak

“It’s the North Koreans—I’m tellin’ ya” Screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber actually made paying Hasbro a boatload of cash for their seemingly unnecessary board game property a relevant story point in their big budget, science fiction actioner Battleship. The fact they had to conjure up a humanoid alien race with reptilian characteristics and cloaking technology to keep gigantic flying nautical vessels off radar is beside the point. The American public loves extra-terrestrial invasions, thinks Andy Roddick’s wife Brooklyn Decker is hot, and can’t help getting revved up when their armed…