Month: October 2017 | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Florida Project [2017]

2017/10/192020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

What are you playing? It’s hard not to think about another A24 produced film while watching Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project. The themes it presents due its impoverished central characters barely scrapping by financially on a day-to-day basis are identical to Andrea Arnold‘s American Honey and its band of twenty-somethings traveling the countryside to scam cash in return for a no-strings-attached freedom slaves to a weekly paycheck simply cannot understand. Whereas the latter focused upon adults who have chosen this life, however, Baker’s look at an Orlando motel turned off-the-books…

REVIEW: Il conformista [The Conformist] [1970]

2017/10/182020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

Slaughter and melancholy. At one point towards the end of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Il conformist [The Conformist], Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) turns to Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) and relays a brief synopsis of a dream. He talks about how he was a blind man who needed an operation that only his former professor (Enzo Tarascio‘s Quadri) could perform. The procedure is a success and ultimately he’s left with the doctor’s wife (Dominique Sanda‘s Anna) in his arms. This scene is perhaps two minutes long and yet proves to be the key to…

REVIEW: Creepshow [1982]

2017/10/172020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

Seven years before HBO brought EC Comics’ 1950s-era horror strips to life for their long-running anthology series “Tales from the Crypt”, Stephen King and George Romero delivered their own homage to the style with Creepshow. The former served in the role of screenwriter with two of the five chapters being adaptations of short stories he had written previously. The latter took his spot behind the camera to orchestrate King’s madness and mayhem with the help of special effects legend Tom Savini, each tale proving to be a mixture of black…

REVIEW: Never Here [2017]

2017/10/162020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

You’ve done a bad thing. Miranda Fall (Mireille Enos) is a cataloger. Her art leads her on journeys following new subjects in order to understand who each is by what each does and possesses. She voyeuristically captures their lives in photographs and objects, exhibiting her findings as though a celebration despite some of her targets believing it more akin to a memoriam. And why shouldn’t they? Miranda is ostensibly stealing their identities for public consumption and in turn private financial compensation. She uses the mundane routines and patterns of others…

REVIEW: In a Lonely Place [1950]

2017/10/152020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

There’s no sacrifice too great for a chance at immortality. Just because you might be innocent of one crime doesn’t mean you’re a saint who’d never commit another. We’ve seen this type of complex premise as recently as “The Night of”, a miniseries about racial prejudice and police neglect wherein the accused (and audience) is unaware of whether he committed murder. And as facts of the evening in question are put into context, details also surface about the defendant to color him in a different light than initially assumed. Our…

REVIEW: The Foreigner [2017]

2017/10/122020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

Trust or fear. I like a good action thriller without a clear target because it allows the story to develop where cat and mouse chases usually reside. Martin Campbell‘s The Foreigner is a good example as it shows what happens when a sharp plot is made paramount. We know who the bad guys are—a group of young IRA rebels rekindling a fight long since dormant—but not their identities. So distraught dad Quan Ngoc Minh (Jackie Chan) must improvise along his quest for vengeance after his daughter is killed in a…

BIFF17 REVIEW: After the Sun Fell [2017]

2017/10/122020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

You have an empty space that you need to fill. Everyone’s family is crazy. Some may seem crazier than others, but that’s generally a byproduct of them being less self-conscious. The question we don’t ask ourselves—whether a part of the insanity or watching as an outsider—is why. Why does one member prove so gratingly obnoxious when you know he/she knows what others think? Why does another member retreat into his/her insular existence away from the sprawling chaos so that any opportunity to join the others feels like a chore? What…

REVIEW: The Craft [1996]

2017/10/102020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

Nothing makes everything all better again. There’s a ton of untapped potential in Andrew Fleming‘s The Craft. It delivers four embattled teenage girls faced with tragic circumstances out of their control who seek to empower themselves against the internal and external struggles presented by them. This is a premise that allows for empathy and understanding because they each know what it’s like to be on the other side of nightmare. Maybe their acquisition of powers through the occult will present a period of dominance as a knee-jerk reaction to going…

BIFF17 REVIEW: Sunset Park [2017]

2017/10/102020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

With anger you can lose everything. When Duane Sarcione (Michael T. Weiss) finds himself in the hole with mobster ‘The Sledge’ (Sam Douglas), he has no choice but to run. It’s not a surprising move despite only knowing him for five minutes—gambling has a hold and he’s drowning under the weight of turmoil both in and out of his control. This act, however, isn’t without collateral damage. His wife had already passed away, but his young son Gino (Nolan Lyons) was still around struggling to get through school with the…

BIFF17 REVIEW: The Sounding [2018]

2017/10/092020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

There has to be a reason. What is it about our quest to not simply help those in need, but solve what is supposedly ailing them? What in the history of mankind shifted focus from wanting to understand that which was different to assimilating (eradicating) it? Greed. Power. Sanctimony. Ego. There are an infinite number of words able to answer these questions and yet no one has actually solved the issue. Or perhaps no one can. Utopic visions presume that it is possible: peace on earth. We strive to fight…

BIFF17 REVIEW: Crash Pad [2017]

2017/10/092020/04/25 Jared Mobarak

You can’t outwit fun. Morgan (Christina Applegate) is drowning in a marriage on the rocks. Both her career and her husband’s (Thomas Haden Church‘s Grady) are booming—the time allotted to spend together often earmarked for something else. So they’ve drifted apart over the last fifteen years. Their sex life is non-existent and he’s away on business trips that “run long” more often than not. Why wouldn’t she assume he was therefore cheating on her? No reason besides a level of trust that appears non-existent in a day and age where…