Month: January 2019 | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Marguerite [2017]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I won’t live forever, you know. Stereotyping is proven real when an elderly Marguerite (Béatrice Picard) asks her nurse Rachel (Sandrine Bisson) if the person she was talking to on the phone was her boyfriend only to hear, “My girlfriend” instead. The woman’s face drops in surprise with an, “Oh” before finding a smile and the kindness to ask her name. We wonder if things will now change between them, assuming a senior citizen wearing a crucifix might not “approve” of such behavior. How will Marguerite react the next time…

REVIEW: Detainment [2018]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Do you know what truth is? Two ten-year old boys were placed into police custody in 1993 on suspicion of kidnapping and murdering the not-yet three-year old James Bulger in Merseyside, England. They were interrogated separately with parents present about their whereabouts on that fateful day and whether or not they were guilty of the crime. It’s unfathomable to believe children so young could have done what they did, but it’s even harder to comprehend them lying about it when the truth starts to spill out. These interviews were recorded…

REVIEW: Lifeboat [2018]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

The heart is where your real thinking comes. Director Skye Fitzgerald‘s Lifeboat is the latest “human face” documentary to get an Oscar nomination. What might set it apart from others—for better or worse—is that it seeks to highlight the face of the man doing the saving as a beacon of hope more than the victims as byproducts of our collective failure as a species. His name is Jon Castle and he’s without a doubt a true hero. He also died this past year (the film’s rescues occurred in 2016) and…

REVIEW: Madre [Mother] [2017]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Why hasn’t he come back? A woman (Marta Nieto‘s Marta) and her mother (Blanca Apilánez) arrive at the former’s apartment talking about men. Marta speaks about friends, her mother leans into romanticism when the subject of a handsome gentleman comes up, and some jealousy arrives when it’s explained that he’s already attached to someone else. The stakes are thus very low at the start of Rodrigo Sorogoyen‘s short film Madre [Mother]—innocuous, every day fodder to create conflict where none exists as a means for intrigue. We are thus allowed to…

REVIEW: Christine [1983]

2019/01/192020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

You have nothing to lose but your virginity. It shouldn’t be surprising to see parallels between John Carpenter‘s Christine and today considering we live in an era where phrases like “boys will be boys” are used to full stop sanitize the increasingly deplorable actions of young white American men. Back in the 1970s when this film (and Stephen King‘s novel on which it is adapted) is set, we would laugh at the so-called “locker room” talk of teenage boys sexualizing their female classmates and knowingly chiding the nerdy kids chiming…

REVIEW: Stan & Ollie [2018]

2019/01/192020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Do we really need that trunk? As someone completely unversed in the Laurel and Hardy oeuvre, I’m not sure there could have been a better introduction to the comedic duo than through their last year together. With Jon S. Baird and screenwriter Jeff Pope‘s Stan & Ollie (inspired by A.J. Marriot’s book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours enough to warrant a mention in the credits if not a credit itself) comes a tale that’s more than simply about their success. No, this film is a glimpse behind the curtain…

REVIEW: Destroyer [2018]

2019/01/182020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Let’s see if it’s your time. It’s billed as a down and dirty revenge flick with some calling it a redundant variation on a theme “better” films already delivered. That’s not how I see it, though. No, Karyn Kusama‘s latest is about guilt. Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman) isn’t drowning herself in alcohol and pushing everyone who loves her away because she’s devoting her life to finding the leader (Toby Kebbell‘s Silas) of the criminal outfit she infiltrated as a green undercover agent over fifteen years ago. That may be her…

REVIEW: Braid [2019]

2019/01/172020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Reality will never keep up with our dreams. Our lives consist of uncertainties. To progress forward is to confront each new possibility as the product of dream or nightmare—an open door to leap through and succeed or a closed window to surrender all hope of escape. We retreat within ourselves for the motivation to jump higher and rely on those we trust to help break our inevitable falls. One road leads to comfort until the shine wears off. The next winds its way towards rebirth until tragedy strikes or self-doubt…

REVIEW: Glass [2019]

2019/01/152020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Why are we the only ones? It began nineteen years ago with a tale about emotional and physical duress—byproducts of tortured lives being led by purportedly “great” men too defeated to reach their full potential until circumstances reveal the power possessed within. M. Night Shyamalan was playing with the notion of superheroes walking the thin line between reality and fantasy. He sought to show how quick humanity is to explain away the impossible as quite ordinary, reducing those leaning upon the former into victims of delusion. Through Unbreakable‘s David Dunn…

REVIEW: King of Thieves [2018]

2019/01/142020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Stop talking shop. She’ll turn in her grave. It’s not about the robbery. King of Thieves wouldn’t be worth telling if it was just watching these senior actors ranging sixty-years old to eighty-five fictitiously accomplish the “biggest jewel heist in British history” since there obviously won’t be any foot-chases or complex wire-suspended acrobatics. No, the reason this tale (adapted by Joe Penhall from a Vanity Fair article by Mark Seal) proves interesting is due to the characters they portray. How do diabetes, incontinence, and hearing loss affect their chances of…

REVIEW: Unbreakable [2000]

2019/01/112020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I had a bad dream. I didn’t watch The Sixth Sense when it was in theaters and therefore never had much of an affinity for it due to knowing the twist before eventually sitting down. I’m not therefore certain why I was excited to check out his follow-up Unbreakable. It could have been friends wanting to go or simply that it was “the” movie to see that weekend in November. All I do remember is my confusion when the opening screen of text arrived with statistics about comic books. I…