Day: June 2, 2016

REVIEW: A Bigger Splash [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Try not to frighten the horses” More than loosely based upon Alain Page‘s 1969 French script La Piscine, Luca Guadagnino finally follows up his magnificent I Am Love with A Bigger Splash, his first narrative fiction since. It tells the story of a rockstar legend (Tilda Swinton‘s Marianne Lane channeling Ziggy Stardust) and her long-term documentarian boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts‘ Paul De Smedt) as they vacation on a secluded Italian island for much needed recovery—she post-vocal surgery and he not so far removed from a violent suicide attempt spurred by alcoholism.…

Read More

REVIEW: Careful What You Wish For [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“This guy looks like he’d hit a child” The real mystery is how Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum‘s Careful What You Wish For got itself a theatrical release in the first place—no matter how limited. I’m not surprised Starz Digital is handling distribution, though, since it feels exactly like a late night pay cable ticket sanitized to an R-rating for lustful eroticism rather than actual chemistry, nudity, or plausibility. Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately…

Read More

REVIEW: Honeyglue [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I meant stay” It’s a story about a dragonfly and the princess bee—a girl with terminal cancer and the boy to which she falls love with only three months left to live respectively. Their love exists in a sort of vacuum beyond time, a reality of the now regardless of future or past before them. She (Adriana Mather‘s Morgan) is but a woman unhindered by her middle class upbringing and conservative lifestyle. He (Zach Villa‘s Jordan) a sensitive soul, fluid in gender, appearance, and desires, who just so happened to…

Read More