Month: December 2016 | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Paterson [2016]

2016/12/232016/12/23 Jared Mobarak

“Without love, what reason is there for anything?” Doctor William Carlos Williams includes a line inside his epic poem “Paterson” that states: “no ideas but in things.” When writer/director Jim Jarmusch was asked what this meant, he replied: “that you start with the things around you and the details of daily life and you find beauty and resonance in them—poetry grows out of that.” By those terms poetry is forever all around us in the tiny details of life that too many let pass them by without a second thought.…

DESIGN: Cultivate Cinema Circle Fall 2016

2016/12/222020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

REVIEW: Elle [2016]

2016/12/222017/01/11 Jared Mobarak

“It was necessary” Director Paul Verhoeven has made a career of pushing the envelope whether through violence, sex, politics, or all three wrapped together. It’s hardly surprising then that his buzzword of choice on the promotional trail for his latest Elle has been “controversial.” The word choice is appropriate considering David Birke‘s script (adapted from Philippe Djian‘s novel Oh…) plays with taboos in ways that subvert public consciousness, but there’s an even more appropriate adjective: dangerous. Controversy is needed to shake us out of our doldrums, but it can also…

REVIEW: Eyes Wide Shut [1999]

2016/12/202017/11/30 Jared Mobarak

“Fidelio” Would you gamble everything for lust? Is thinking about infidelity as egregious an offence as the act itself? After all, faithfulness isn’t merely a construct of the physical world—our trust and respect goes beyond the exterior into the very fibers of our being to make the words “I’d never cheat on you” flow effortlessly and involuntarily from our lips even when thinking about the person we’d commit it with in a heartbeat. But lust clouds our judgment. It makes us do things we wouldn’t normally do. It allows for…

REVIEW: L’avenir [Things to Come] [2016]

2016/12/202016/12/20 Jared Mobarak

“Can we put ourselves in the place of the other” No one is making movies with as much depth of character as Mia Hansen-Løve—so much depth that you may wonder where the plot is considering everything is hinging on a single trajectory. But that’s how our lives progress. How we experience our own evolution stems from our actions and our interpretations of others’ actions. She focuses on her lead so acutely that we begin to know them as though a long lost friend. We feel for their struggle and hope…

REVIEW: Fences [2016]

2016/12/192016/12/23 Jared Mobarak

“A fastball on the outside corner” It seems that many people have been docking points from Denzel Washington‘s latest directorial effort Fences by labeling it as “too theatrical.” Well, that’s somewhat hard to avoid when you’re dealing with August Wilson‘s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play and its wall-to-wall dialogue touching upon love, responsibility, race, and politics on an emotionally resonate level beyond much of what Hollywood delivers “cinematically.” I’ve personally never held a stagey aesthetic against a film as long as the performances prop up the script’s location shortcomings…

REVIEW: Lion [2016]

2016/12/162016/12/22 Jared Mobarak

“Did you really look for my mum?” The Weinstein Company is lucky Google hasn’t moved into the film production game yet like tech giant Amazon (unless you count YouTube Red) or else they may not have secured the rights to one of 2016’s most upliftingly heart-wrenching movies of the year in Lion. We’re probably lucky too because had Google found a way to produce the true story of Saroo Brierley‘s improbable search themselves, a lot more time may have been spent on Google Earth’s role rather than the more pressing…

REVIEW: The Thing [1982]

2016/12/152019/01/20 Jared Mobarak

“That’s going to win someone the Nobel Prize” It may not be the first adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.‘s novella Who Goes There?, but John Carpenter‘s The Thing is definitely hailed as the most definitive. Unlike The Thing from Another World‘s humanoid adversary, Bill Lancaster (who took over screenwriting duties from an uncredited Tobe Hooper) writes the alien force wreaking havoc on his Antarctic research team as originally envisioned. The terror therefore isn’t conjured as a result of what it is as much as what it can do. An…

REVIEW: La La Land [2016]

2016/12/152016/12/22 Jared Mobarak

“Or one more dream that I cannot make true” Writer/director Damien Chazelle burst onto the scene in 2014 on the back of his Oscar-nominated and critical darling Whiplash. It took this jazz drummer time to finally breakthrough with his sophomore feature, time that saw actors and producers taking a risk on him that would ultimately pay off big creatively and financially. Well the spoils trickled down to the man behind the art too as a long gestating musical project from 2010 became a feasible follow-up. This effort would end up…

REVIEW: Ma vie de Courgette [My Life as a Zucchini] [2016]

2016/12/14 Jared Mobarak

“Well, I think I killed my mum” You have to respect when a story targeted towards children is allowed to possess pathos. Take Gilles Paris‘ 2002 novel Autobiographie d’une courgette for example—a 228-page piece centering on a nine-year old boy’s experience living as an orphan in France after accidentally killing his mother. This is the kind of dark subject matter many parents wouldn’t let their children go near and yet it also contains a hopeful strain of optimism and love those same kids crave. But even if some readers aren’t…

REVIEW: Always Shine [2016]

2016/12/13 Jared Mobarak

“Don’t worry sweetheart. We’ll make sure you look beautiful.” Here’s a tale of two women, one-time best friends currently turned strangers. Or is it a tale of two halves: a brash, no-nonsense attitude towards identity at risk of coming off obnoxious against a meekly, non-confrontational façade meant to keep relationships devoid of conflict? If it’s the second option, which half is real and which artificial? Does society’s archaic understanding of femininity force out-going women into self-induced silence? Couldn’t the idea that you have to be one way to fit in…