Drama | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Game Changers [2015]

2015/07/252017/04/07 Jared Mobarak

“That’s not how you use that card” Can a film about twenty-eight year olds be considered a coming-of-age story? I guess it can when the two men in question were teenage professional gamers because that’s exactly what Robert Imbs‘ Game Changers is. And if we really thought about it, that age is a pretty critical crossroads in a person’s life regardless of the path they’ve taken to get there. Thirty is kind of an unspoken cut off point where maturity is either embraced or ignored forever. That’s a gross generalization…

REVIEW: Mommy [2014]

2015/07/232015/07/27 Jared Mobarak

“A mother doesn’t wake up one morning not loving her son” If I can be justified in agreeing with all the praise after seeing just one of his films—his latest, Cannes Jury Prize-winning Mommy—twenty-five year old writer/director Xavier Dolan is every bit the wunderkind label that has been thrust upon him. Five films in six years all by the time he’s hit the quarter century mark with four debuting at Cannes and the other Venice? How can you not take notice of such accomplishments? Carrying the preconceptions a critical darling…

REVIEW: Southpaw [2015]

2015/07/212015/07/24 Jared Mobarak

“This is the talk you get when you lose not when you win” The origins of Southpaw are interesting because it was born from screenwriter Kurt Sutter‘s want to collaborate with Eminem. Now try to picture Marshall Mathers after peering upon any of the bloodied and crazed publicity stills of his replacement Jake Gyllenhaal without laughing. Sutter has said the boxing aspect of the script was meant as a metaphor for the rapper’s personal struggles and the fight for his daughter is exactly that. He hoped the project would prove…

REVIEW: Lila & Eve [2015]

2015/07/162015/07/17 Jared Mobarak

“Talk is meaningless” A movie isn’t necessarily ruined because its so-called twist is easily deciphered, especially when the reveal is less for shock value than depicting the psychological struggle of grief. For Lila Walcott (Viola Davis), the loss of her son Stephon (Aml Ameen) as an innocent bystander to a drive-by shooting has drowned her in exactly that emotion. It’s pushed her to the brink of sanity, acceptance, and quite possibly redemption right into the arms of a like-minded individual languishing in almost identical circumstances. Lila befriends Eve (Jennifer Lopez)…

REVIEW: Pink Moon [2015]

2015/07/04 Jared Mobarak

“Nothing is permanent” It’s a shame that films like Sal Bardo‘s Pink Moon are necessary for some to realize the true value of human life, but that’s the world we live in. Even with the Supreme Court ruling for same sex marriage throughout the United States, we are a long way towards equality. Many Republicans still refuse to budge on the topic, for all intents and purposes making a return to the White House a tenuous proposition at best. And you surely know someone whose knee-jerk reaction to two women…

REVIEW: Birthday [2015]

2015/07/042015/07/04 Jared Mobarak

“Some assembly required” It’s not difficult to know what’s coming as soon as a Marine (Chris Gouchoe) and his wife (Mandy Moody) are seen discovering the discrepancy in their math counting down the days until his return home. She has it marked on her calendar as forty-two to go while he gently explains it’s actually forty-three. A lot can happen in twenty-four hours, though, so we of course must assume the worst. Depending on your mettle and strength, death can almost prove an easier result than the future many veterans…

REVIEW: Eden [2014]

2015/06/272015/06/29 Jared Mobarak

“Save France with Coke” The rock and roll life has always been filled with temptation no matter what decade. So electronica, house, and garage music’s heyday (has it ended?) of the 90s proves no exception. With its world of DJs and samplers standing at turntables while their audience danced and raved below, however, learning a little bit of the behind the scenes drama couldn’t hurt from building upon its mystique. Unsurprisingly its luminaries possessed the usual copious amount of drugs, sex, and money woes like in every other genre. What…

REVIEW: Трудно быть богом [Hard to Be a God] [2014]

2015/06/252015/06/26 Jared Mobarak

“Don’t drink. I only sniff now.” There’s a plot inside Aleksey German‘s final film Трудно быть богом [Hard to Be a God]—an audacious sci-fi epic slinging mud and feces in our faces while everyone onscreen sniffs them like drugs until we’re involuntarily following suit. No really, there is. Well, maybe a lingering vestige of what Arkadiy and Boris Strugatskiy‘s original novel contained that the 74-year old auteur (who’d wanted to adapt it since the 60s before finally completing it after a decade-long production process ultimately ending in his death from…

REVIEW: Unexpected [2015]

2015/06/202015/07/20 Jared Mobarak

“I don’t know what’s going on with the bananas at Trader Joe’s right now” Yes Kris Swanberg‘s Unexpected revolves around two surprise pregnancies and the mothers-to-be reacting to brand new futures set before them. However, it doesn’t use that premise to build a tower of clichés for us to watch topple to the ground in tragedy or remain erect via zany shenanigans like so many other films utilizing pregnancy as a plot device before it. Instead Swanberg and cowriter Megan Mercier take pains to deliver this unpredictable, anxious, and highly…

REVIEW: পথের পাঁচালী [Pather Panchali] [Song of the Little Road] [1955]

2015/06/182015/10/23 Jared Mobarak

“Go ask him for money” The story behind Satyajit Ray‘s debut film পথের পাঁচালী [Pather Panchali] [Song of the Little Road] is one you cannot separate from the work itself. It’s an underdog tale full of hardship and financial woe—incidents that dragged production along for three years before finally bringing India to the world in its neorealism style (after all, Ray helped scout Calcutta locations for Jean Renoir‘s The River and loved Vittorio De Sica‘s Bicycle Thieves). Money plays a huge part in both stories, especially the film’s plot based…

REVIEW: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl [2015]

2015/06/112015/06/29 Jared Mobarak

“Respect the research” Alfonso Gomez-Rejon‘s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl can be described as The Fault in Our Stars meets Be Kind Rewind. While the correlation to the latter is nearly identical with both comically parodying cinematic greats (albeit of differing oeuvres), the former hits as a contrast despite similar subject matter. Whereas Stars‘ has two leads afflicted by cancer in order to express how they cope with their mortality, the titular “dying girl” here is a tool used to wake its healthy lead up. Above pity, strength,…