Month: May 2019 | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: An American Werewolf in London [1981]

2019/05/182021/08/03 Jared Mobarak

Beware the moon, lads. It’s not hard to believe John Landis wrote his first draft of An American Werewolf in London at eighteen. The male gaze throughout is right in line with the comedies he would bring to life (The Kentucky Fried Movie and National Lampoon’s Animal House) to achieve the success necessary to secure a ten million dollar budget more than a decade later. By focusing on two co-eds crossing the Atlantic to backpack through the moors around his age while writing, he’d of course end up injecting a…

REVIEW: Archipelago [2011]

2019/05/172020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

I’ll wait and see what I’m told to do. There’s no better name for what Joanna Hogg has created than Archipelago. Not only has she set her film upon a series of islands on which the central family vacations, but she’s also molded the members of that horde into those very same scattered mounds of land. This is to be their send-off for Edward (Tom Hiddleston) as he’s about to embark on an eleven-month stay in Africa as an aid worker: just him, his sister Cynthia (Lydia Leonard), their mom…

REVIEW: La battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers] [1966]

2019/05/162020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

You never know. It’s almost impossible to receive an objective depiction of war considering how easy it is to skew art towards propaganda through the dissemination of a political agenda. And it’s only been getting harder as new technology keeps costs down when making movies that serve one side of things no matter the veracity of claims held within. A film like Gillo Pontecorvo‘s La battaglia di Algeri [The Battle of Algiers] therefore stands as a vision of what once was with a documentary-like vérité style refusing to pull punches…

REVIEW: Unrelated [2008]

2019/05/162020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Just don’t tell the olds. Yeah? Tired and defeated, Anna (Kathryn Worth) walks her way down dark roads to the rented Italian villa of her oldest friend Verena’s (Mary Roscoe) extended family. She was supposed to arrive with husband Alex, the vague excuse of him having to stay behind last minute as good a reason for her palpable malaise away from the larger group as the confrontational phone calls she’ll eventually field from him. There’s obviously trouble in the water where their marriage is concerned, but its severity is left…

REVIEW: The White Crow [2019]

2019/05/152020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

I shall fight fear. While I don’t know anything about ballet, I am familiar with Soviet defection. Being a Buffalonian whose hometown hockey favorite as a kid was Alexander Mogilny means I must. It helps then that director Ralph Fiennes and screenwriter David Hare (inspired by Julie Kavanagh‘s book Rudolf Nureyev: The Life) start their film The White Crow at its end rather than beginning. By sitting Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin (Fiennes) down across from a not so composed government official to answer the pressing question of why his star pupil…

REVIEW: Hail Satan? [2019]

2019/05/142020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Very quickly everything got real. There’s subjectively no greater terrorist threat to America than Evangelical Christians. At their side is Catholicism: itself an extremist branch of Christianity shouldering centuries of blood and abuse on its hands spanning genocide, murder, rape, and child abuse. It’s these Christian zealots who yell that Muslims are bringing Sharia Law to our country with no basis in fact besides fear-mongering propaganda propagated by government officials rejecting the Constitution’s secular tenets for those of God’s Ten Commandments. They have spent so much energy vilifying other groups…

REVIEW: Domino [2019]

2019/05/132020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Nothing works like vengeance. Director Brian De Palma made a wise decision distancing himself from the long-awaited release of Domino. Not only was it a troubled production he admits was ruled by unprofessional Danish producers that didn’t pay people on time (if ever), but he also didn’t write the script (that credit goes to Petter Skavlan, someone who should disavow it too considering the original 148-minute cut was reduced to a paltry 88). All this adds up to a poorly edited, badly-scored shadow of what a De Palma thriller should…

REVIEW: The Biggest Little Farm [2019]

2019/05/122020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Diversify, diversify, diversify. If I learned anything from John Chester‘s The Biggest Little Farm, it’s that you can do anything you choose to do. You can use your privilege to tell your city friends the crazy idea of wanting to buy a huge farm and make it self-sustainable, accept their ridicule, and eventually reap the benefit of their friends of friends with ample financial support—I’d love full disclosure on that price-tag because this project is massive with professionally branded farmers’ market wares and enough renovations to blow through a full…

REVIEW: Fuga [Fugue] [2018]

2019/05/112020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Prison would be better. Stories dealing with amnesia generally gravitate towards a heartwarming conclusion wherein a character regains his/her bearings to live happily ever after within the life they lost. This reality is due to the fact that the afflicted is often found soon after the incident that’s left them unfamiliar with their former self. They wake up without knowing who they are, quickly become confronted with people who do, and ultimately work towards bridging the gap. What happens, though, if the time separating disappearance and reunion is much longer?…

REVIEW: Velvet Buzzsaw [2019]

2019/05/102020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

All art is dangerous. The underlying idea of Dan Gilroy‘s art world horror Velvet Buzzsaw is an intriguing one because it forces us to realize how extensive the profiteering branch patterns of one single canvased tree of paint are. There’s the artist seeking notoriety, the gallery owner providing it, the consumers catching a glimpse at exhibits, the pocketbooks of buyers, the curators banking on ticket sales after hopping onto the bandwagon, and the critics supplying exposure in return for clicks. And that’s just the main offshoots which themselves possess more…

REVIEW: Pokémon: Detective Pikachu [2019]

2019/05/092020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

I can feel it in my jellies. It’s almost shocking that nobody made a live-action Pokémon movie considering the card game’s heyday was back in the 1990s while the anime and video games still ruled kids’ televisions. That’s not to say the property ever disappeared. Nintendo couldn’t have turned “Pokémon GO” into an international smartphone phenomenon without strong brand recognition spanning multiple generations. But what was there to lean on narratively? The creatures themselves can’t say anything but their names and the human characters are kids trying to catch them…