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TIFF19 REVIEW: Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit [Heimat is a Space in Time] [2019]

2019/08/252020/03/25 Jared Mobarak

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. How much of our ancestry is tied to the history of the places we call home? While some of us would probably answer “None,” we’d be wrong. Just because your family tree was lucky enough to exist on the periphery of major historical moments as bystanders doesn’t mean you haven’t been impacted by wars, tragedies, inventions, and art in ways that defined your choices and subsequently the choices of your children. Why did my grandfather immigrate to America from Lebanon (then part…

TIFF19 REVIEW: My English Cousin [2019]

2019/08/242020/03/25 Jared Mobarak

I am cooked to perfection. It’s been seventeen years since Fahed Mameri left Algeria to achieve a better life in England. Since then he has settled in Grimsby (a place with high unemployment and little infrastructure to sustain a healthy living), married an Englishwoman, and found two jobs with which to earn barely enough money to pay the rent. Because his dream of prosperity hasn’t quite worked out, nostalgia for family and the more conservative lifestyle of their African nation instills a desire within to return. His mother is growing…

REVIEW: Maiden [2019]

2019/08/062020/03/25 Jared Mobarak

The ocean is always trying to kill you. There’s no better example of the patriarchy poisoning the word “feminism” than a woman explaining that she rejects the word before than saying she fights for a world where women can accomplish everything a man can instead … in other words: feminism. Despite what men want you to think, the word advocates for women’s rights on the basis of equality between sexes. It’s not about women gaining extra rights—men simply manipulate the conversation this way to play the victim while consciously pretending…

REVIEW: Echo In the Canyon [2019]

2019/07/112020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

You always brought your guitar. It started with Jacques Demy‘s Model Shop. Director Andrew Slater saw it, thought about the era depicted (it was released in 1968), and got that Laurel Canyon sound—where so many of the folk-to-rock transitional bands lived—stuck in his brain. This shouldn’t be surprising considering Demy recruited Spirit to create a soundtrack (what should be their third album) that captured this exact vibe before the film’s box office failure made it so the material wouldn’t see the light of day until 2005. One thing apparently led…

REVIEW: Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché [2019]

2019/06/252020/03/26 Jared Mobarak

How come she got lost in the shuffle? An opening montage of images and maps briskly moving backwards from present-day to the late nineteenth century while moving from Hollywood to France foreshadows exactly what Pamela B. Green has delivered with Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché. This is a history lesson, investigative journal, and memorial for one of the great pioneers of cinema who inexplicably had been left out. With phone calls, interviews, archival footage, and Skype sessions discovering new and unknown ancestral lineages in real time, Green…

REVIEW: Framing John DeLorean [2019]

2019/06/132020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

He is open to interpretation. I was three when Back to the Future immortalized John DeLorean‘s namesake automobile the DMC-12 (known plainly as the DeLorean since no other model was produced). Doc Brown’s time machine was therefore unsurprisingly the extent of what my mind could associate with the former visionary of General Motors who continuously found himself flying close enough to the sun to harness its power and ultimately be destroyed by it. So it was confusing to watch Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce‘s comical procession of filmmakers who…

REVIEW: The Russian Five [2019]

2019/05/282020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Literally—we’re making it up as we go along. While everyone hates division rivals when it comes to loving the Buffalo Sabres, I don’t necessarily care. They despise Toronto, loathe Boston, and dislike Montreal. Hartford earned ire when they had a team and Ottawa too upon coming back into the league. For me, though, it was always different. Because Toronto was in the Western conference when I started watching hockey, I actually liked them. And I still kind of do despite their switch to the East in 1998. Conversely, however, the…

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: 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: Ask Dr. Ruth [2019]

2019/05/012020/10/02 Jared Mobarak

“My parents actually gave me life twice” A couple mentions of Dr. Ruth Westheimer as “Grandma Freud” are seen and heard throughout Ryan White‘s documentary Ask Dr. Ruth, but it isn’t until the conclusion that we discover the label is apt beyond its original intent. On the surface it’s hardly an original nickname considering she was over fifty when starting her radio show “Sexually Speaking” and thus an easy backhanded compliment to make. When the film turns to her ninetieth birthday party, however, her grandmotherly ways actually rise to the…

REVIEW: What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine [2019]

2019/04/282020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

We were the ‘dark’ Star Trek. More than merely a look back at what was, Ira Steven Behr‘s documentary project What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine is also a way to look forward—a perfect contrast considering how maligned the show was during its tenure compared to today. You could say “Deep Space Nine” stands as a dividing point amongst fans that appreciated the grand social and political ideals of the Star Trek universe and those who wanted spaceships fighting with laser beams. The latter are the…