Month: October 2016

BIFF16 REVIEW: 2307: Winter’s Dream [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I guess Hell finally froze over” The year is 2307 and Earth is three centuries removed from climate change transforming its surface to glacial ice. Humanity has evolved to living underground, improving technology to help sustain their tenuous ecosystem outside of the subzero temperatures. This includes insulation injections to combat cold for up to 48-hours, strength enhancements, and even artificial intelligence boosters. It also led to the manufacture of a synthetic Humanoid race as slave labor. Super-strong, immune to the elements, and unable to reproduce, they do all the things…

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BIFF16 REVIEW: Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“No LSD needed” When Tony Conrad passed away in April 2016, I knew of him as an experimental filmmaker. It’s hard to be an art student at the University at Buffalo—despite his teaching in Media Studies rather than Fine Art—and not know his name at the very least. But that was all I knew: a name, reputation, and the plaudits of countless friends who knew so much more. Only when obituaries started being released in the likes of The New York Times did I realize how renowned a figure he…

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REVIEW: A Wedding [1978]

Jared Mobarak

“Death is a four letter word” It’s unfathomable to think that a film as elaborately sprawling as Robert Altman‘s A Wedding was given birth out of a joke, but that’s exactly what happened. Having some fun with an interviewer during publicity on 3 Women, the director exclaimed that his next work would be “a great big fancy wedding” and ultimately made good on the promise. He, John Considine, Patricia Resnick, and Allan F. Nicholls crafted their epic to the tune of two full months of production on an eighty-acre estate…

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REVIEW: Coming Through the Rye [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Everyone loves Mercutio” Emmy-winning director James Steven Sadwith makes his feature theatrical debut with a story close to his heart. Coming Through the Rye fictionalizes his experiences as a 1969 boarding school teen and his adventure finding reclusive author J.D. Salinger. We assume liberties were taken considering the opening caption loquaciously elongates the usual “inspired by” to “a lot of this is inspired by real events if you want to know the truth,” but that’s okay since this sort of chatty flourish aligns perfectly with the character created as his…

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REVIEW: Sam [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I kinda like being the only guy in New York with a gynecologist” Even though Nicholas Brooks is about thirty years too late for his gender-swapping, chauvinistic rom-com Sam, he does end up successfully subverting expectations. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a good movie. There are enough fades to black to make me drowsy and unaware of whether or not my eyelids were closing, the physical comedy feels like amateurs on stage at dinner theater, and the sexism—while intentionally broad for Brooks’ thesis—is so blatant that you have to…

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REVIEW: The Girl on the Train [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m not the girl I used to be” I like unreliable narrators because it’s fun to witness actions unfolding without knowing whether anything onscreen is real. The person could be a liar, schizophrenic, a secondary source ignorant to pertinent facts, or simply mistaken. So I got excited upon learning of Paula Hawkins‘ The Girl on the Train and its lead Rachel (Emily Blunt). Here was a character who literally knew nothing but what she was told. A raging alcoholic prone to nightly blackouts, her reality becomes the stories told in…

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BIFF16 REVIEW: Tower [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Stay away from the university area” My first experience with rotoscope animation was probably Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life in 2001. I found it a fascinating technique retaining the live action movement and reality while allowing the room to add dream-like flourishes of fantasy that fit the frame aesthetically. You don’t care when someone’s head becomes a balloon and flies away because the transition has been seamless—there’s no jarring switch from human to cartoon that takes you out of the metaphor itself. A college film studies class later introduced me to…

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BIFF16 REVIEW: Gold Star [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I wish I could stop worrying about everything” I know what Victoria Negri‘s debut feature Gold Star is about even if it never quite finds the footing to fulfill its promise. It’s about a young woman trapped in a life she never thought she’d lead as a part-time fitness club employee who’s lost the nerve to follow her dreams of becoming an internationally renowned concert pianist. It’s about her existential struggle for identity, reconciling desire with a rebelliously nihilistic streak, and coping with the unavoidable reality her birth provided. Because…

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