Day: January 28, 2013

REVIEW: The Mayor [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“The plumbing died” Rather than create some sort of exposé about the goings on inside nursing homes and the common belief it is inhumane, cowardly, and disrespectful to place your aging parents in one for their Golden Years, director Jared Scheib went in the complete opposite direction. Life couldn’t be better for the residents of the Dallas, Texas independent living facility at the heart of his documentary The Mayor. Sure many are widowed, depleted of all sexual drive, and immobile without the help of canes, walkers, or wheelchairs, but none…

Read More

REVIEW: Buzkashi Boys [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Cheer for these champions” From crumbling bombed-out architectural shells, the black soot-covered faces of the public, and a national sport as rough and grotesque as Buzkashi’s horse polo with a dead goat, life in Afghanistan is quite easily one of the hardest, most brutal lives one can imagine. We sit here in America and let the media paint the entire country as our enemy—poverty stricken heathens who should be overjoyed by our intrusion upon them to instill some semblance of Westernization—and as a result never get to see how intrinsically…

Read More

REVIEW: Curfew [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Sophia always comes back to life” If you look at Shawn Christensen‘s career and see a credit for writing the Taylor Lautner-starring Abduction as its centerpiece, confidence doesn’t necessarily run high. And yet his nineteen-minute short Curfew has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short Film. As the saying goes, never judge a book by its cover. I’m not going to say this film is great or deserves the victory or anything else overly hyperbolic. I will however admit that the feeling I had after watching wasn’t what…

Read More

REVIEW: Dood van een schaduw [Death of a Shadow] [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“I could show you the true beauty of death” Inside an intriguing steampunk dimension just outside the realm of our own lives a collector of shadows (Peter van den Eede) whose museum looks as though owned by a devout Robert Longo aficionado. Grungy canvasses line his walls with silhouetted bodies contorted into myriad positions at the time their flesh and blood counterparts’ died. This creepy sunglass-wearing gentleman employs one of his works of art to be a photographer of sorts that immortalizes each priceless moment on the edge between life…

Read More

REVIEW: Asad [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Soon? My life is filled with soons.” Young Asad (Harun Mohammed) is an energetic boy with an insane knowledge of the ocean and tides that make him a perfect candidate to become a fisherman like his teacher, old Erasto (Ibrahim Moallim Hussein). Saddled with a streak of bad luck preventing him from catching anything substantial, however, his time spent on the beach drifts from fishing onto his idol Laban (Adiwale Mohamed) and the other men readying to go off with bad attitudes and guns to rob Europeans on the open…

Read More