Month: September 2016 | www.jaredmobarak.com

TIFF16 REVIEW: Kati Kati [2017]

2016/09/202016/12/31 Jared Mobarak

“You’re here because you’re dead” Most of cinema’s best films are those that do rather than explain. These works are created by artists wielding airtight concepts insofar as attaining their goal of delivering a specific, emotion-fueled message. Kenyan creative Mbithi Masya‘s feature debut Kati Kati is a perfect example of what can be made when the right resources are supplied to the right people. Tom Tykwer, Marie Stenmann-Tykwer, and their One Fine Day shingle (originally formed to facilitate year-round artistic opportunities for children in Nairobi) helped with the former while…

REVIEW: Storks [2016]

2016/09/192016/09/21 Jared Mobarak

“We never stop” While a bunch of adults were definitely having a good time during Nicholas Stoller‘s Storks, I’m not sure about their children. It wasn’t restlessness, though. If anything they were catatonic, a similar state as myself. Now I did chuckle at a few of the higher concept stuff because the absurdity of a stork and penguin stabbing each other with a fork in silence so as not to wake a sleeping baby is funny. And the children chuckled at least twice in response to displays of destruction because…

TIFF16 REVIEW: Colossal [2017]

2016/09/172017/05/01 Jared Mobarak

“I’m sorry. It was a mistake. It won’t happen again.” Whether the existence of time travel or an alien invasion, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo has proven king at dealing with large-scale concepts affecting small-scale characters. Always looking to portray how genre catastrophes are handled by nobodies on the ground without government credentials or scientific degrees, he continues this trend again with his latest monster movie Colossal … for the most part. After certain truths are revealed, it’s easy to discover how two former classmates in a sleepy city with one watering…

TIFF16 REVIEW: Bleed for This [2016]

2016/09/172016/09/19 Jared Mobarak

“Christ and elephants” There’s something about boxing movies that gets butts in seats regardless of so many being practically the same story. The formula almost always concerns some type of personal and professional redemption and Ben Younger‘s Bleed for This is no exception. Being a true telling of Vinny Pazienza’s (Miles Teller) arduous journey back into the ring after a near-fatal car crash severed his neck, however, means it possesses some substance beyond the old “washed up” bid for revenge against the press or a former coach/manager who’s now inexplicably…

TIFF16 REVIEW: Carrie Pilby [2017]

2016/09/172017/05/01 Jared Mobarak

“Don’t be such a child” The synopsis for Carrie Pilby can sound atrocious on paper. Most films utilizing an eighteen-year old Harvard graduate do so as periphery color because the trope lends itself to obnoxious pedantry and an unsympathetic notion of “first world problems.” Having your titular lead (played by Bel Powley) be that person is therefore a risky proposition. She’s an introvert bagging on society for willingly lowering their IQ to fit a cesspool of mediocrity despite making no attempt to engage or discover whether that assumption is true.…

REVIEW: Mr. Church [2016]

2016/09/162016/09/16 Jared Mobarak

“I learned to turn away from the sun and face the moon” If you didn’t know what you were getting into upon sitting down for Bruce Beresford‘s Mr. Church, you will following this onscreen text: “Inspired by a True Friendship.” The vagueness of this statement notwithstanding, the words ooze enough schmaltz to prepare you for the melodrama of death and miracles screenwriter Susan McMartin has concocted. Maybe she based it on a friendship she had with an adult male who become her father figure in a time of need or…

REVIEW: Blair Witch [2016]

2016/09/152016/09/16 Jared Mobarak

“Lisa, I’m so sorry” It was only sixteen months after the release of The Blair Witch Project that Joe Berlinger‘s sequel Book of Shadows bowed in an attempt at striking while the iron was hot. The film that was ultimately released into theaters wasn’t his cut—whether this fact has any bearing on quality remains to be seen—and inevitably went on to get panned by critics and audiences alike. Any plans for more installments were scrapped and the legend of the Burkittsville monster was mothballed. So why then has a new…

REVIEW: The Blair Witch Project [1999]

2016/09/152016/09/15 Jared Mobarak

“I think the legend is unsettling enough” It may not have been the first “found footage” film ever made, but for a seventeen year-old like me in 1999 The Blair Witch Project might as well have been exactly that. I still remember the marketing campaign, the newspaper ads and fictionalized legend trying to make us believe everything we’d be seeing onscreen actually happened. It purported that three co-eds (Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael C. Williams) went into the woods to shoot a documentary about a ghost/witch rumored to have…

TIFF16 REVIEW: ’76 [2016]

2016/09/142016/09/15 Jared Mobarak

“Love has no boundaries” It appears my first foray into Nollywood (Nigerian cinema) was well selected being the latest from director Izu Ojukwu, one of the nation’s most ambitious artists. Add some heavy hitters in Ramsey Nouah, Rita Dominic, and Chidi Mokeme and ’76 delivers a wonderful sampler platter of the best talent this region has to offer. But don’t look at the genre and think Bollywood song and dance because Ojukwu’s film is a straightforward drama with historical significance and emotional gravitas. While it’s first and foremost a love…

TIFF16 REVIEW: Boys in the Trees [2016]

2016/09/112017/11/30 Jared Mobarak

“Can’t end a story without a dead body” We’ve all lost friends whether from naturally parting ways or an avoidable blow-up proving petty in hindsight. Age advances and tastes evolve—we don’t often think much of the phenomenon because they find peers more attuned to who they’ve become just like you. But sometimes the severed relationship carries with it pangs of guilt. Maybe the fracture was triggered by lame excuses like the concept of survival of the fittest, you joining your oppressors in order to stop being oppressed. Perhaps you cut…

TIFF16 REVIEW: The Limehouse Golem [2017]

2016/09/112017/05/10 Jared Mobarak

“Here we go again” It took fifteen years of perseverance—acquiring the rights, losing them, and reacquiring them at the behest of screenwriter Jane Goldman stoking the fire—but producer Stephen Woolley finally got Peter Ackroyd‘s 1994 novel on the big screen as The Limehouse Golem. There were some big names attached from Merchant Ivory originating plans to Woolley hoping for Neil Jordan years before developing it with Terry Gilliam. Don’t let this taint your opinion when peering upon Juan Carlos Medina‘s name on the director’s chair, though. Despite being only his…