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REVIEW: Home [2015]

2015/04/072015/04/08 Jared Mobarak

“I’m the interrupting cow! Moo!” While it didn’t need help on its way to a fifty million dollar opening weekend, Home may have benefited from a G-rating. Its journey in search of family taken by Oh the Boov (Jim Parsons) and Tip the Human (Rihanna) skews very young in message and comedic style—unexpectedly so for me. So sweetly cute, it’s hard to think many children of PG-viewing age would find worth considering it’s slightly more juvenile than they’d admit is ‘cool’ in the presence of their peers. Only once they’ve…

REVIEW: Cinderella [2015]

2015/03/102015/03/13 Jared Mobarak

“Have courage and be kind” For anyone who cannot stand singing, Disney’s latest iteration of the timeless Cinderella is catered to you. I know Chris Weitz and the other screenwriters on the project before him poured through the fairy tale’s vast lineage for every detail they could cull together into what they surely believe to be the definitive version, but what I saw onscreen is the same thing I saw as a child in cartoon form. Just without the sing-songy “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boos”. There are a couple spoken ones for…

REVIEW: Frozen Fever [2015]

2015/03/102015/03/13 Jared Mobarak

“Dry Banana Hippy Hat” I liked Frozen as much as the next person for telling a familiar story in a new way with emotion, surprises, and a cute little snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad). However, I can’t imagine even the staunchest supporter of its legacy doesn’t possess some fatigue. Elsa and Anna are everywhere, “Let It Go” is seared into my eardrums, and the whole fight for title of platonic true love originator against Maleficent proved just how rabid fandom can become—and how annoying. Despite the overkill, kids across the…

REVIEW: McFarland, USA [2015]

2015/02/172015/02/20 Jared Mobarak

“There ain’t nothing American Dream about this place” I entered the theater expecting McFarland, USA to be a Million Dollar Arm redux with Latinos in place of Indians. What director Niki Caro actually delivered was something more akin to Miracle—still not a “great” film per se, but definitely a worthwhile telling of a heartwarmingly Disney, sports-themed tale. While the studio that loves plastering “based on a true story” atop every bit of marketing material available to them didn’t do so with this property has me questioning the authenticity of what’s…

REVIEW: かぐや姫の物語 [Kaguyahime no monogatari] [The Tale of The Princess Kaguya] [2013]

2015/02/042015/02/05 Jared Mobarak

“That was Heaven telling us who she’d grow into” There is no questioning whether かぐや姫の物語 [Kaguyahime no monogatari] [The Tale of The Princess Kaguya] is an extraordinary work of art. The beauty of its simplistic, watercolor ink-lined drawings is a breath of fresh air within a medium of 3D-rendered characters trying so hard to not look like they’re animated when they should be embracing that fact. It is anime through a traditional lens harkening back centuries for a style to fit the age of the folktale at its back—The Tale…

REVIEW: Song of the Sea [2014]

2015/01/282015/01/29 Jared Mobarak

“You’re going to be the best big brother in the world” Writer/director Tomm Moore received the okay to contemporize his peoples’ folklore from the seanachai he listened to while growing up in Ireland, Eddie Lenihan. A traditional storyteller known for modernizing these same archetypes, Lenihan explained to Moore that adapting them to our time might be the only way for us to keep them alive now that new technology has forced the oral custom of passing down history moot. He’s right too as the two films Moore has thus crafted…

REVIEW: La lampe au beurre de yak [Butter Lamp] [2014]

2015/01/282015/01/30 Jared Mobarak

“Go and look at yourself on the photos” The butter lamp is a traditional feature of Tibetan temples and monasteries as a representation of wisdom’s illumination. The light removes the darkness of the mind to focus it and aid meditation. As Buddhists ignite a number of these lamps for funerals and pilgrimages as a way to help the nomads and visitors approach God and the deceased, writer/director Wei Hu utilizes a photographer’s myriad backdrops to allow the world to approach them. These “posters” run the gamut between one of the…

REVIEW: The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice [2008]

2015/01/18 Jared Mobarak

“We do not profit from the artifacts!” It took two movies with potential for The Librarian franchise to finally deliver on the promise of its premise. Even though The Curse of the Judas Chalice is the most “TV-like” of the trilogy, it also possesses the best example of both its layer of educational value and that of its adventure comedy. Just because it introduces vampires as real world entities doesn’t necessarily prevent it from also giving an authentic history/mythology lesson about Vlad the Impaler and Judas Iscariot and how the…

REVIEW: The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines [2006]

2015/01/172015/01/17 Jared Mobarak

“In case of hippos” Well, The Librarian: Quest for the Spear must have been a big hit for TNT because its sequel received a much bigger budget. There are still many instances of poor CGI in Return to King Solomon’s Mines, but the majority of the piece is at least shot on location rather than behind green screen backgrounds (minus a really bad moment with animated bricks revealing a new portion of the Metropolitan Public Library). The opening is a legitimate chase sequence as Flynn Carsen (Noah Wyle) and his…

REVIEW: The Librarian: Quest for the Spear [2004]

2015/01/162015/01/17 Jared Mobarak

“I should’ve known he was evil. He gave me an A-minus.” With my exposure to Noah Wyle being limited to his role in “Falling Skies”, I can’t necessarily be blamed for assuming his character in The Librarian: Quest for the Spear would be a similar Tom Mason type. After all, both men prove to be an intellectual thrust into perilous situations and leadership positions they never would have original thought they’d be in. And by the look of the poster, Flynn Carsen is quite obviously an Indiana Jones for the…

REVIEW: Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb [2014]

2014/12/252014/12/25 Jared Mobarak

“They’ll burn up like tiny scarabs in Sinai” It appears director Shawn Levy and new screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman have thrown the jokey nature of Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant‘s Battle of the Smithsonian away to bring the Night at the Museum series back to what first made it a success. Secret of the Tomb reminded me a lot of the original installment with a thinly veiled metaphor once again providing the dramatic arc for Larry Daley’s (Ben Stiller) adventure, this time showing a need to say…