Film Reviews | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Veronica Mars [2014]

2014/03/14 Jared Mobarak

“And you have what we in the business call a crazy-ass murder wall” Are you Team Piz? Team Logan? Do you have any clue what I’m talking about? Well, if it’s the latter I’m prescribing you rent all three seasons of “Veronica Mars” on DVD now. I didn’t want anything to do with little Kristen Bell and her super sleuthing either back in the day, but I jumped on the bandwagon when she, creator Rob Thomas, and alum went on Kickstarter and asked for help to craft a feature film.…

REVIEW: Le Week-End [2013]

2014/03/082014/03/13 Jared Mobarak

“That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” Children are our legacy—our immortality. We sacrifice everything to raise them in our image, hoping for the best until they’re set free as fully formed adults ready to continue the cycle. And through our rosy-colored glasses of optimism we assume the journey ends happily in a successful second act for them and a well-earned third unencumbered by anything but love and adventure for us. Sadly, however, such broad ideas often prove little more than fantasy as decades spent in the…

REVIEW: Enemy [2014]

2014/03/062014/05/07 Jared Mobarak

“Chaos is order yet undeciphered” When you read a synopsis for the late Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago’s The Double you’ll find a very straightforward tale of doppelgangers. There’s the alpha, the pushover, and the innocent victims caught between; the insanity of seeing an exact replica in the flesh paired with the infinite possibilities such a discovery could mean. One is married; one has a girlfriend. The latter injects himself into the former’s world through curiosity, the first into the second’s purely for unfounded revenge and sexual desire. They exist…

REVIEW: Broken [2013]

2014/03/052014/03/05 Jared Mobarak

“Nice shot” A Frenchman who has been working as an assistant director in Hollywood since 2009, Mathieu Turi is leveraging his experiences into a budding career as an original filmmaker too. His second short entitled Broken is a visually arduous movie that takes place almost entirely inside a stuck elevator trapping two strangers together: English-speaking Spaniard Michael (Iván González) and French-speaking Julie (Isabel Jeannin). It’s a confined space that Turi makes interesting by fading-in to different vantage points—showing them with the door at their backs, in front of the walls,…

REVIEW: 300: Rise of an Empire [2014]

2014/03/032014/03/06 Jared Mobarak

“Fear his freedom!” This is what a copy of a copy looks like. It pretends to be equal to the original—and in some aspects proves to be exactly the same—yet arrives seven years after everything its groundbreaking ancestor provided was expanded and evolved upon. I loved 300 and gave it a perfect score despite some issues because it was so fresh and exhilarating. It showed how the capabilities of cinema could be pushed even further than Frank Miller‘s other adaptation Sin City, breathing life into a dark and gruesome graphic…

REVIEW: Particle Fever [2014]

2014/03/012014/03/05 Jared Mobarak

“The hype is approximately accurate” Science! You either see it as the backbone to understanding or you don’t and everyone who doesn’t may want to avoid Mark Levinson‘s Particle Fever because it’s first and foremost a document about the subject’s cool factor and importance. If you’re a creationist and everything you hold true about our origin comes from a book written centuries ago by multiple people who potentially had a simultaneous psychotic break to hear voices, all sense of wonder and discovery is nonexistent in the present. What point is…

REVIEW: L’image manquante [The Missing Picture] [2013]

2014/03/012016/02/23 Jared Mobarak

“Our only belonging was our spoon” How do you tell the story of something as horrific as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge’s four-year rule over Cambodia after the Kampuchean Revolution when the only footage shot was that distributed by the regime itself? This is the problem director Rithy Panh faced, a teenager when war hit to disperse the citizens of Phnom Penh into work camps so they could build a newly “freed” land. He witnessed the atrocities and lived through the famine as party leaders and their dogs ate,…

REVIEW: Le passé [The Past] [2013]

2014/02/282014/03/01 Jared Mobarak

“Some things can’t be forgiven” If A Separation didn’t cause writer/director Asghar Farhadi to be revered as an auteur who understood domestic strife and illness’ lasting effect on those left to pick up the pieces, you better believe he is now. Switching to France for Le passé [The Past], the filmmaker brings us into an interesting clash of worlds for Iranian Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returning after four years of estrangement from soon-to-be ex-wife Marie (Bérénice Bejo). This pairing of ethnicities underlies the action, especially with prospective fiancé Samir (Tahar Rahim)…

REVIEW: Dirty Wars [2013]

2014/02/272014/02/28 Jared Mobarak

“We call them the American Taliban” The Oscar-nominated documentary Dirty Wars is a powerful, eye-opening exposé on the covert operations of the United States government abroad in war zones both declared and not. You’ll find yourself at the edge of your seat as it progresses forward; riveted to every word and newly discovered evidence explaining how far up the chain of command these whispered secrets go. From covered up night raids in Afghanistan killing an American trained police commander and two pregnant family members to an unconscionable drone strike massacre…

REVIEW: 一代宗師 [The Grandmaster] [2013]

2014/02/262014/04/10 Jared Mobarak

“Keep the light burning” I think 一代宗師 [The Grandmaster] loses something in its translation for an American who couldn’t spot the differences between Kung Fu and Karate if his life depended on it (besides the former being Chinese and latter Japanese, of course). There’s the significance of the dark rain beating down on multiple fight scenes I’ve read provides the “white noise” for one’s “sense of touch”; the honor in accepting one’s actions to seek vengeance by taking vows to forever be alone as compensation; and the history of a…

REVIEW: Non-Stop [2014]

2014/02/252014/02/28 Jared Mobarak

“Status?” This film could have just as easily been called Deflection as Non-Stop because screenwriters John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach, and Ryan Engle (none of whom instill a stellar track record for Hollywood blockbuster success) have a lot of fun making sure to inject as many red herrings into the mix as possible. Even at start we wonder if our prospective hero Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) could be the perpetrator despite trailers leading us towards a frame job. His U.S. Marshal is an alcoholic, hot-tempered, and forlorn. A semi-threat to…