Month: October 2019

BIFF19 REVIEW: The Sympathy Card [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Consider it a death-bed order. It’s an unorthodox but sweetly unsurprising premise: the cancer-stricken Emma (Petey J. Gibson) demands her wife Josie (Nika Ezell Pappas) meet someone new so she won’t become a lonely widow without love. This turn of events doesn’t surprise because writer/director Brendan Boogie already presented the unbelievably awkward way in which their relationship began. Emma is therefore right to worry the odds aren’t in their favor that Josie absentmindedly elbows another unsuspecting match in the nose to break the ice and ignite a guilt-fueled confidence that…

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BIFF19 REVIEW: Frances Ferguson [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Was this breaking the law? We never meet the narrator (Nick Offerman) of Bob Byington‘s film Frances Ferguson. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing or uncommon, but I couldn’t shake the idea that we should. It’s because he isn’t some omnisciently objective voice telling us a story. He interjects opinions, giggles, and often meanders to the point where his subject (Kaley Wheless‘ Frances) must speak up to help him along. In one instance he mentions a “We” as though his (and another’s) entrance on-screen was imminent. It’s not. He means…

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BIFF19 REVIEW: The Fan Connection [2019]

Jared Mobarak

This is hockey heaven. Buffalo sports fans are die-hard. Go to most big cities across America and you’ll find a Queen City backers’ bar of ex-pats communing to enjoy (and, this past decade, lament) the teams they grew up watching beside their parents. It doesn’t take long for the electricity and excitement to flood back upon returning home either whether for new job opportunities or a weekend vacation—something Mary Wall discovered by watching her hometown Sabres’ wild NHL playoff run in 2006 while on her two-month hiatus from working as…

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BIFF19 REVIEW: A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem [2019]

Jared Mobarak

It is the hardest thing to walk away from. Everything in this world comes down to control and that’s what makes the work being done by minority classes (gender, race, sexuality, religion, etc.) so important today. When those in power look the same (white, male, old), there’s little room to want to look outside their sphere of influence and recognize their impact upon anyone else but themselves. That’s where the manipulations come in and why they’ve become as easy to perform as breathing. And it all compounds in the case…

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REVIEW: Joker [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Don’t forget to smile. I would have bought writer/director Todd Phillips‘ line about bringing his gritty origin film Joker to the 1970s as a way of removing it from the existing DC Extended Universe (more than he already did by recasting the titular character after Jared Leto played him in Suicide Squad) if not for new comments made on this recent press tour. Trying to drum up sympathy for the plight of the mistreated “underdog,” the man behind The Hangover‘s billion-dollar trilogy has lamented that you can’t do comedy in…

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NYFF19 REVIEW: Born to Be [2020]

Jared Mobarak

We’re going to make her whole. How does a self-taught upright bass player who dropped out of Julliard to pursue his parents’ dream of medical school become a bona fide superhero? Easy. He raised his hand. Dr. Jess Ting may have graduated at the top of his class and found success as a New York City plastic surgeon, but none of that compares to the courage and humanity shown when agreeing to lead the newly-formed Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital. The position was created in…

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REVIEW: Memory: The Origins of Alien [2019]

Jared Mobarak

It lives in our dreams. Here’s the thing you should know up-front: Alexandre O. Philippe‘s Memory: The Origins of Alien doesn’t break new ground. No crazy revelations unknown before the documentary began production are discovered. Instead we get first-hand accounts of the struggles to get Alien made, the communal artistic synergy that ultimately helped propel it (the majority of talking head interviews), what it was like to be on-set as an actor (Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright are the only participants save archival comments from John Hurt), and how critics,…

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BIFF19 REVIEW: Rendezvous in Chicago [2019]

Jared Mobarak

The whole point of this game is to look. There’s a reason the first word in Michael Glover Smith‘s triptych Rendezvous in Chicago isn’t pluralized despite consisting of three distinct stories. It stems from the fact that Smith sought to close out his cinematic trilogy about on-screen relationships and communications within (Cool Apocalypse and Mercury in Retrograde are the others) with the three possible stages of a romantic union. Rather than call each chapter a rendezvous, the title is referring to our engagement with them as the beginning, middle, and…

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