Month: May 2015

REVIEW: Mad Max [1979]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m a fuel-injected suicide machine” You couldn’t turn on the television without seeing Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome when I was growing up. I couldn’t tell you anything about it besides the fact Tina Turner co-starred, but I remember the whole terminally crazed aesthetic of George Miller‘s post-apocalyptic world. So much so that I always assumed I had seen the two previous entries. While I’m pretty sure memories of The Road Warrior lie somewhere dormant in the back of my mind, I cannot say the same about the original. The yellow…

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REVIEW: The D Train [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Like lawn chairs” Calling The D Train a comedy is probably the most accurate description to bestow upon it, but the label doesn’t quite do it justice. I’m still wrestling about whether that’s because it’s more than a simple comedy or because it utilizes the genre so it can get away with a strain of insensitive humor. Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel‘s sophomore feature script (they wrote Yes Man) ultimately feels alternatingly exploitative and heartfelt. Each time they take a pitch-black turn to some heavy corners that force Dan Landsman…

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REVIEW: Barely Lethal [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Like, totem pole” Much like director Kyle Newman‘s first theatrical release Fanboys, his sophomore effort Barely Lethal is built for a niche audience with minimal wiggle room to capture the excitement of casual viewers just stopping by. You don’t need to travel farther than the backlash-riddled comments section of its YouTube trailers to understand this. Snide remarks about its apparent quality, jokes about Samuel L. Jackson loving money, and easy comparisons to fare like Agent Cody Banks are the norm in today’s internet culture of anonymous hate and sarcasm for…

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INTERVIEW: Alex Winter, director of Deep Web

Jared Mobarak

While you may know him as Bill S. Preston, ESQ, Alex Winter the actor has effortlessly become Alex Winter the director. Hot on the heels of his successful Napster documentary Downloaded comes Deep Web: a look behind the curtain at the 96% of the internet we don’t see. But while the film began as an overview of this expansive world freely accessible by Tor—for good (journalistic anonymity) and bad (illegal drug trade)—something happened during production that blew the doors wide open. Ross Ulbricht was arrested under the accusation that he…

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DESIGN: Cultivate Cinema Circle

Jared Mobarak

Born from a partnership with my Buffalo movie critic colleague Jordan M. Smith comes Cultivate Cinema Circle, a local screening series helping to “foster a healthy, fervent film culture in the Buffalo area.” After many discussions about the name and goals, I started to play with the word cultivate until the idea of harvesting radishes and the like from the ground materialized. From that initial thought came the decision to make a film reel into a vegetable plucked from the soil that can be shared with the world. And like…

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