Month: November 2017

Babel’s Toni Morrison on “keeping the reader alive and worried”

Jared Mobarak

Leave it to the Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize in Literature, and Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning Toni Morrison to get me back into Kleinhans Music Hall for Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Babel series after two years away with special thanks going to Artistic Director Barbara Cole for letting Cultivate Cinema Circle piggyback onto the occasion with a screening of Jonathan Demme‘s cinematic adaptation of Beloved. Our presentation of the movie last month was but one of many events put on as part of the center’s Civil Writes Project that culminated in…

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REVIEW: Curtains [1983]

Jared Mobarak

Call it research. By the end of Peter R. Simpson‘s Curtains—I use the producer’s name since he ultimately finished the film two years after original director Richard Ciupka left with only forty-five minutes shot—there are just three surviving characters. One is the potential victim being chased, another the homicidal maniac under a plastic old woman mask who’s killed the rest, and the last of the trio off-screen somewhere so we’re left to question the murderer’s identity. Will it be revealed that it’s been the person we’ve thought it was since…

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REVIEW: Goodbye Christopher Robin [2017]

Jared Mobarak

I’ve had enough of making people laugh. I want to make them see. It begins with a letter—the kind that rips heart from chest. World War II is in full swing and the Milnes (Domhnall Gleeson‘s Alan and Margot Robbie‘s Daphne) are biding their time awaiting word from their son Christopher (Alex Lawther). They know what news arrives as soon as they see the mailwoman riding up their driveway, though. They know their son is gone. War claimed another innocent soul, an inevitability Alan experienced first-hand fighting the fight prematurely…

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REVIEW: Princess Cyd [2017]

Jared Mobarak

You get to see where your mom came from. Tragedies are never isolated incidents with a single victim, perpetrator, and survivor left to remember (or forget) what happened. Oftentimes those roles expand to encompass multiple parties or even overlap in ways that let blame, hate, and forgiveness coexist. This scenario is only rendered truer when it comes to a family ordeal, when those now gone leave a permanent void never to be filled again. And while we cope for a time—telling ourselves we’ve gotten over what happened to the point…

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REVIEW: Bad Grandmas [2017]

Jared Mobarak

I’m nervous like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Writer/director Srikant Chellappa and co-writer Jack Snyder aren’t fooling around when it comes to Bad Grandmas. We don’t meet their senior citizens as innocent grannies playing Rummy before watching them turn “bad.” No, Mimi (Florence Henderson) walks into Jim’s (David Wassilak) place of work, waits for the only other employee in the office to leave, and confronts him with gun drawn. Whether or not the trigger depresses accidentally, no tears are shed. Mimi is stone cold, chiding…

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REVIEW: Murder on the Orient Express [1974]

Jared Mobarak

With the help of a hat box. If the way in which Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) manipulates his suspects into perfectly incriminating themselves upon inquisition—often unbeknownst to us until the final reveal—infers that he has a photographic memory, we the audience need a bit more exposition as it concerns yet unseen connections than perhaps the film would like to share. This is why director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paul Dehn provide an opening montage of newspaper clippings and shadowy reenactments of young Daisy Armstrong’s kidnapping and subsequent murder. Because it…

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REVIEW: Thor: Ragnarok [2017]

Jared Mobarak

Good luck with that, new Doug! Marvel fatigue has officially hit me, but not like a ton of bricks as much as a nagging sense that the studio is merely going through the motions. Unfortunately this slow unraveling is worse than a huge misstep because it means that a shift back onto the rails is less likely, especially with everyone hailing Thor: Ragnarok as a franchise entry that “breaks the rules.” If that means “push plot to the background for bloated excess dragging pacing out to the point of realizing…

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REVIEW: Das merkwürdige Kätzchen [The Strange Little Cat] [2014]

Jared Mobarak

And onions are my cats. We’ve all felt paralyzed at one time or another, fearing existence and responsibility as opposed to external forces and death. Life becomes our burden, the rote machinations to remain an upstanding member of society and the myriad social imperatives endured to be seen as a person worth ignoring—someone who neither demands attention from being abnormal or overly exceptional. To simply be can prove exhausting because the act of stasis comes with more minutiae than you may think is necessary. Our minds race to decide whether…

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