Month: April 2019 | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: JT LeRoy [2019]

2019/04/192020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

I wouldn’t even exist without her. It really is a wild story. Laura Albert, in need of expressing her pain outside of her own identity, creates a fictional version of herself to write three novels as exorcism under “his” name. Who knows if she anticipated the type of acclaim they and “he” would receive, but Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy necessitated her performing multiple characters out of her San Francisco apartment with fake accents to speak with journalists, fans, and artists over the phone in order to keep the charade alive. Only…

REVIEW: The Curse of La Llorona [2019]

2019/04/182020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

She’s already here. When Warner Bros. decided to capitalize on the box office and critical success of James Wan‘s The Conjuring by crafting an extended universe of creepy spirits with a feature length tale born from that film’s prologue, the results were not great. Annabelle felt rushed at best and retrofitted at worst—a generic horror injected with a popular character for no reason other than selling tickets. If not for Wan going back to the well for The Conjuring 2 to remind audiences of the potential this franchise possessed, the…

Top 100 Albums of 2018

2019/04/182020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Honorable Mention Bernice – Puff: In the Air Without a Shape; Don Diablo – Future; Tory Lanez – MEMORIES DON’T DIE; What So Not – Not All The Beautiful Things; Jagwar Twin – Subject to Flooding; Derek Minor – The Trap; Brazilian Girls – Let’s Make Love; Neko Case – Hell-On; Low – Double Negative; Franz Ferdinand – Always Ascending; OMB Peezy – Loyalty Over Love; Damien Jurado – The Horizon Just Laughed; Snow Patrol – Wildness; Gustavo Bertoni – Where Light Pours In; Thirty Seconds to Mars – AMERICA;…

REVIEW: Peterloo [2018]

2019/04/172020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

Let’s see what he has to say. Films devoid of main protagonists are generally created as such because the event orbited by their ensemble of characters proves the focal point instead. So when that central moment is a massacre, you must brace for the reality that many will end up victims left for dead. The filmmaker is therefore tasked with ensuring his/her audience recognizes the line between good and evil, just and immoral. Writer/director Mike Leigh accomplishes this separation straight away in Peterloo with his prologue contrasting a young, distraught…

REVIEW: Missing Link [2019]

2019/04/162020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

What chicken? With Laika CEO Travis Knight branching out to live-action on Bumblebee, it was only right that Chris Butler would carry the studio’s fifth feature film after the ambitious undertaking that was Kubo and the Two Strings (which the former directed and the latter co-wrote). Missing Link also becomes Butler’s follow-up to ParaNorman—my personal favorite from the stop-motion firm—and similarly stars a character that believes in what no one else does. Whereas Norman was sympathetic in his ability to speak with ghosts, Sir Lionel Frost’s (Hugh Jackman) quest to…

REVIEW: Little Woods [2019]

2019/04/152020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

Your choices are only as good as your options. There’s a great documentary about what life is like in the fracking boomtowns of North Dakota entitled The Overnighters. In it we witness an example of humanity at its simultaneous best and worst. Desperate men seeking an escape from troubles back home arrive to find a different sort of struggle that they may never overcome despite promises sold. Angels prove themselves to be demons and vice versa as director Jesse Moss collects candid interviews that reveal just how bad things are…

REVIEW: Rafiki [2018]

2019/04/142020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

We’re going to be something real. Some will dismiss Wanuri Kahiu‘s Rafiki as derivative simply because they refuse to see what makes it so special. They’ll mention its Romeo and Juliet parallel as far as having the children of opposing political candidates fall in love. They’ll compare it to generic love stories—and generic gay love stories—because that’s what it is at its core. And when the subject of prejudice and violence towards these young lovers arises, they won’t shy from deeming it already treaded territory. What such reductive takes ignore,…

REVIEW: The Garden Left Behind [2020]

2019/04/122020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

Why are you here? What’s mostly a vérité document of lead character Tina’s (Carlie Guevara) trajectory towards chemically transitioning from male to female despite being an undocumented immigrant in an expensive city like New York, Flavio Alves‘ The Garden Left Behind is also a rather potent expression of humanity’s collective dysphoria. Tina is at the center and her plight as a transwoman struggling to survive a world that sees her as “less than” is the main through-line, but Alves isn’t afraid to add to her story by shifting focus onto…

REVIEW: Hellboy [2019]

2019/04/112020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

It looked bigger in the cartoon. There’s no getting around the fact that Lionsgate did Guillermo del Toro dirty by not extending him an invitation to complete his Hellboy vision with a third film. Whether their decision was due to whatever rubric used to measure the franchise’s success (that they’d willingly reboot the property so soon shows it was viable enough) or creator Mike Mignola wanting to bring things back to where he thought they should be (as was floated around), they turned their back on a soon-to-be Oscar winning…

REVIEW: Amazing Grace [2019]

2019/04/112020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

We want you to let the folks know you’re here. Released in 1972, Aretha Franklin‘s live album with Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir entitled Amazing Grace took the country by storm selling over two million copies in America alone on its way to double platinum certification. Knowing it was going to be special, Warner Bros. hired a film crew and director Sydney Pollack to record everything for an accompanying documentary much like they did with Woodstock and Michael Wadleigh two years prior. Fresh off his first…

REVIEW: 情牽拉麵茶 [Ramen Teh] [Ramen Shop] [2018]

2019/04/102020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

He kept her memory alive with every bowl of ramen. While Eric Khoo‘s Ramen Teh [Ramen Shop] is at its core a story about a young man looking to reclaim a part of his heritage that was lost, it’s also a rather poignant account of the lasting scars of war and the struggle to separate hate from love when two worlds collide. Because it’s not simply that Masato (Takumi Saitoh) never returned to Singapore after leaving with his parents at age ten. He wasn’t welcome there. Despite the country being…