Film Reviews | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Elvis [2022]

2022/08/032022/08/03 Jared Mobarak

He was a taste of forbidden fruit. There’s a lot to talk about when dealing with Elvis Presley. Too much for one film to do him justice. That’s why Baz Luhrmann (who writes with Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) decides to tell someone else’s story instead: that of Colonel Tom Parker, the self-proclaimed “Snowman” who discovered the King and helped make him an American icon. Unfortunately, he also probably played the biggest role in killing him thanks to the pills and injections necessary to keep Elvis on-stage and…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: 大怪獣のあとしまつ [Daikaijyu no Atoshimatsu] What to Do with the Dead Kaiju?] [2022]

2022/08/022022/08/04 Jared Mobarak

We’re protecting people’s right not to know. The easiest way to describe the tone of Satoshi Miki‘s realization of an objectively ingenious concept (What happens to the rotting carcass of a defeated kaiju?), is to mention the question to which every journalist demands an answer after a blister filled with the gaseous byproduct of the monster’s decomposition bursts: Does it smell like poo or puke? If that sounds like your idea of a good time for two hours, Daikaijū no Atoshimatsu [What to do with the Dead Kaiju?] is for…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Da-eum-so-hee [Next Sohee] [2022]

2022/08/012022/08/04 Jared Mobarak

Let’s do this. And here I thought capitalism’s hold on the American education system by way of unpaid internships was bad. As documented in July Jung‘s extern drama Da-eum-so-hee [Next Sohee], what’s happening in South Korea is even worse. It all comes down to incentives—not for the children, but the institutions profiting off their labor. When big companies with huge executive payrolls (since managers need managers who also need managers while hourly employees become statistical cogs in the slave machine) need cheap and naïve workers to fill call center desks…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible But True] [2022]

2022/07/302022/07/31 Jared Mobarak

There’s a jewel? We all get older. It’s a part of life. Some do so gracefully. Others racked with fear. What’s interesting, and a major component of Quentin Dupieux‘s latest absurdist comedy Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible But True], is that few know which they are until they confront a potential avenue to cheat aging altogether. That’s the case with Alain (Alain Chabat) and Marie Duval (Léa Drucker). If we asked them how they felt about the subject at the start of the film, they’d probably say they hadn’t really thought…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Country Gold [2023]

2022/07/302022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

I make nothing but hit records and baby boys. The cost of fame sits in the living room wondering aloud whether dad will be home for Christmas. Why these two young boys’ voices have been deepened to sound like they’re forty-year-old drunks slurring through a bender is beyond me (an assumption of it being a dream or game is squashed once mom enters without the effect being called out), but their words have meaning. Troyal’s (Mickey Reece channeling Garth Brooks) star has risen to unimaginable heights, and he’s embraced it…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: さがす [Sagasu] [Missing] [2022]

2022/07/292022/09/13 Jared Mobarak

They deserve to be delivered. Santoshi Harada (Jirô Satô) has a plan. It concerns a three-million-yen reward for helping to capture the infamous serial killer known as “No-Name” (Hiroya Shimizu). Santoshi says he saw him on the train to work. The man who’s been all over the news is inexplicably here in town right now and he’s pretty sure he knows where he can find him. Except, of course, that Santoshi is in no shape to “find” anyone. He’s been clinically depressed and unable to hold a full-time job since…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Inu-ô [Inu-oh] [2022]

2022/07/282022/08/01 Jared Mobarak

Here we are. Director Masaaki Yuasa and screenwriter Akiko Nogi‘s adaptation of Hideo Furukawa‘s novel The Tale of the Heike: The Inu-oh Chapters finishes with a couple screens of text describing its titular Noh performer’s final years of success despite his name being all but forgotten in comparison to the shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu’s personal favorite. It’s why these three have brought the story of Inu-ô [Inu-oh] to life to ensure his name, and that of his friend Tomona from Dan-no-ura, a blind biwa-playing priest, won’t disappear again. What better way…

REVIEW: Resurrection [2022]

2022/07/272022/07/27 Jared Mobarak

Do you think you could kill someone? It starts with a hair. Both a blemish ruining an otherwise immaculate office and a remnant of someone no longer present. Then there comes a tooth implausibly found within the change pouch of a wallet, escalating those aspects while moving beyond innocuous to menacing. Because a hair isn’t a threat—not on its surface. Neither is a tooth except for it being found somewhere much less readily available to strangers than an entire room. Taken together they demand we stop and pause, though. What…

REVIEW: A Love Song [2022]

2022/07/262022/07/26 Jared Mobarak

Fair point. It’s not every day that you get a PG film for adults, but that’s exactly what writer/director Max Walker-Silverman delivers with his bittersweetly joyous feature debut A Love Song. Captured on campsite seven along Turquoise Lake with Mount Elbert as a backdrop, the story concerns a widow named Faye (Dale Dickey) waiting on an old friend from yesteryear. She wrote to Lito (Wes Studi) seven years after the death of her husband (he’s a widower himself) despite not having seen each other in decades. He wrote back saying…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: 搜神傳 [Su Huan-Jen] [Demigod: The Legend Begins] [2022]

2022/07/252022/11/26 Jared Mobarak

Many things could happen in a minute. The Huang family and Pili International Multimedia are back on the big screen, two decades since their feature debut Legend of the Sacred Stone, and, if the end credits of Chris Huang‘s Demigod: The Legend Begins are to be believed, they have many more chapters in-store for their hero Su Hua-Jen. Utilizing the Taiwanese technique of budaixi (operatic glove puppetry), expert cinematography to hide the puppeteers, and impressive computer augmentation for special effects, this tale of leadership strife in the Wu Lin mountains’…

FANTASIA22 REVIEW: Chorokbam [2022]

2022/07/242022/07/27 Jared Mobarak

Why do I have to do all your dirty work? This is not a happy family. Dad (Tae-hoon Lee) works a night security guard shift that makes it so he arrives home as Mom (Min-Kyung Kim) leaves to dry peppers in the sun the next morning. He wants quiet. She wants support. They ultimately sit in silence while eating. Their son (Kang Gil-woo) works as an aide for the disabled, driving around and taking care of patients on the way to their appointments. He doesn’t make much—at least not enough…