Day: June 4, 2012

REVIEW: Extraterrestre [Extraterrestrial] [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Maybe the spacemen will give us diplomas” You wake in a strange place without memory of arriving. You see light’s curved shadows on the wall through clouded eyes while a chorus of clanging is heard in the next room. Disoriented, mildly frightened, and without a clue to what is going on, you’re lost trying to recall the erased minutes of an alcohol-infused evening eerily similar to a crackpot’s account of alien abduction. But rather than a greyed creature with probe in hand, the figure moving in the kitchen is an…

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REVIEW: The Sweet Hand of the White Rose [2010]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m happy when I play alone” Dealing with the tragic nature of death and the myriad split-second decisions we make to set us on our inevitable courses towards mortality, Davide Melini‘s The Sweet Hand of the White Rose becomes both a cautionary tale and memorial to those lost. Shown as a diptych of two parallel existences fatefully intertwined as perpetrator and victim, the subject matter is obviously a personal one with the writer/director. Mark’s (Carlos Bahos) late-twenties bar patron drinking away his sorrows and White Rose’s (Natasha Machuca) youthful child…

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REVIEW: The Puzzle [2008]

Jared Mobarak

“You always spend my money on stupid things” If you hadn’t read a synopsis of Davide Melini‘s short film The Puzzle, you may be confused as to what is happening onscreen. I myself was in the dark until the end credits explained the relationship between the two characters I had just watched come together. But even then the subject matter’s purpose remains slightly out of reach. Opening on an older woman played by Cachito Noguera walking towards her bedroom, we become disoriented once she angrily ends a phone conversation dealing…

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