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REVIEW: Teen Titans GO! To the Movies [2018]

2018/07/232020/04/03 Jared Mobarak

Crack an egg on it. Kah-KAW! Picture this: a popular 1980s comic by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez called The New Teen Titans puts a bunch of sidekicks together to fight one of their rank’s evil father. After a sixteen-year run come new titles to continue the legacy in print with differing line-ups before Cartoon Network developed the property into a television series from Glen Murakami entitled “Teen Titans”. This thing becomes a huge winner for CN with rabid fans and critical acclaim before moving past a planned four-season arc…

REVIEW: #TheLateBatsby [2018]

2018/07/232020/04/03 Jared Mobarak

Time is of the essence. Get those kids into the theater and sell some toys. That’s what the executives at Warner Bros. and DC Comics seem to have instilled as their mantra of late. And you can’t blame them. After their dark cinematic universe failed to do numbers on the big screen and its CW counterpart targets demographics well-beyond toy-buying age, why not pivot to Sunday morning cartoon aesthetic and cutesy irreverence towards their own intellectual properties? Why not take what (I assume) is a popular action figure franchise known…

REVIEW: Bao [2018]

2018/06/162020/04/06 Jared Mobarak

Watching the first half of Domee Shi‘s Bao with a quizzical expression is par for the course. How could you not react that way with this story of a Chinese-Canadian woman who begins to treat a hand-made dumpling like it is her child? It’s one thing to gasp and laugh when the tiny piece of food begins to wail as she attempts to take a bite, but another to witness as it sprout arms and legs before moving through the motions of adolescence. By the time “he” turns into a…

REVIEW: The Incredibles [2004]

2018/06/102020/04/06 Jared Mobarak

I have a weapon only I can defeat. When I saw The Incredibles in theaters upon release, the easy comparison was Fantastic Four—its own cinematic adaptation still a year away in 2005. You have the physical brute of Bob Parr’s Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) like Thing, the stretchy elasticity of Helen’s Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) like Mister Fantastic, an invisible teenage girl in Violet (Sarah Vowell) like Sue Storm, and a cocksure speedster in Dash (Spencer Fox) similar to if not exactly like Human Torch. What made Brad Bird‘s so…

REVIEW: A Wrinkle in Time [2018]

2018/04/222020/04/10 Jared Mobarak

Love is the frequency. While waiting outside the bathrooms after A Wrinkle in Time finished, I saw a white couple with their two young, fair-haired daughters walking out of the theater. Mom and Dad were explaining to one how movies are interpretations. They were reminding her that she had an idea of what the characters looked like while reading and now Ava DuVernay showed hers onscreen. The girl looked up and said, “Yeah. Most of them were blonde in the book.” They went out of earshot soon after, just as…

REVIEW: 大鱼海棠 [Dayu haitang] [Big Fish & Begonia] [2016]

2018/03/292020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Without happiness, what’s the meaning of longevity? In 2004, directors Xuan Liang and Chun Zhang created a Flash animation for an online contest. From there they would expand it into a feature length film steeped in Chinese supernatural legend. And despite some funding snags over its twelve-year production schedule, 大鱼海棠 [Dayu haitang] [Big Fish & Begonia] would ultimately turn its approximately five million-dollar budget (in today’s US dollars) into just shy of one hundred million at the Chinese box office. It’s no surprise then that it would make its way…

REVIEW: I Kill Giants [2018]

2018/03/132020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

We’re stronger than we think. While the main creative force behind I Kill Giants is unquestionably screenwriter Joe Kelly (whose limited comic series of the same name alongside artist J.M. Ken Niimura is the basis for his script), director Anders Walter‘s Oscar-winning short Helium shows he’s hardly a stranger to its subject matter. These two found success through the delicately complex experience had when a child confronts his/her as yet abstract conception of death wherein the infinite expanse of one’s imagination can manifest a path towards understanding. Few people find…

NYICFF REVIEW: Sing Song [2017]

2018/02/282020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

I’m looking for my eyes in your eyes. For Dutch teenager Jasmine (Georgiefa Boomdijk), her homeland of Suriname (a northeastern South American country) is a footnote. She knows little about it or the mother she and her father Winston (Maurits Delchot) left behind sixteen years previously. He refuses to talk about anything pre-Netherlands so her sole connection is a photo of the woman she hasn’t yet resigned herself to believing she’ll never meet. So when a contest held across the Atlantic from where she lays her head asks for online…

REVIEW: Revolting Rhymes Part One [2016]

2018/02/052020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

They’re just stories. You know … for children. Have you ever listened to a fairy tale and lamented the poor villains simply trying to survive? You hear “Little Red Riding Hood” and think about how the wolf is operating by instinct. He sees a potential meal and using cunning ingenuity does all he can to acquire it. When you really step back and look at the story objectively, he’s doing what we all would in his situation. But because we’re human, it’s assumed we will align ourselves with the human…

REVIEW: Paddington 2 [2017]

2018/01/082020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Where all your dreams come true. In true children’s book fashion, Paddington’s (Ben Whishaw) continuing adventures in London alongside the Brown family (Hugh Bonneville‘s Henry, Sally Hawkins‘ Mary, Madeleine Harris‘ Judy, Samuel Joslin‘s Jonathan, and Julie Walters‘ Mrs. Bird) would of course stem from something as seemingly innocuous as procuring a birthday present for his Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton). The activity will prove more difficult than anticipated, a villain will be introduced, and a mystery uncovered through an enjoyable series of pratfalls and error. This is exactly the stuff that…

REVIEW: Paddington [2014]

2018/01/062020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Does anyone know where I can find a home? I remember reading Michael Bond‘s Paddington Bear books when I was a kid and might have even had a duffle coat-wearing stuffed animal too. But I couldn’t tell you a thing about those stories if you put a gun to my head and asked. I recall a little more about The Berenstain Bears and a bit more than that about Teddy Ruxpin—apparently bears just didn’t leave a huge impression upon me. Even so, however, I worried about a live action film…