Suspense/Thriller | www.jaredmobarak.com

FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Ava’s Possessions [2016]

2015/07/242015/11/12 Jared Mobarak

“Did anyone call in sick for me?” When the industry is inundated with supernatural horror redundancies like it has for the past two decades, work like Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg‘s Shaun of the Dead or Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead‘s Spring are necessary to kept things from going stale. A point when audiences simply stop caring does exist. It’s apparently much farther out from the fad’s onset than you’d think America’s attention-deficiency would tolerate, but it will eventually arrive. Perhaps this extended longevity can be attributed to just such…

FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Observance [2016]

2015/07/192015/11/12 Jared Mobarak

“Just watch and report back” You know you’ve seen something special when your only thought upon completion is whether to watch again or scour the internet for possible interpretations. This is what Joseph Sims-Dennett‘s Observance did for me. A horror/suspense filled to the brim with atmosphere and mood, its tension gradually rises like the dark liquid barely contained by a jar in the corner of the room assigned to Parker (Lindsay Farris) for his latest surveillance job. Close-ups of that same fluid dripping down the walls cut in as filler…

FANTASIA15 REVIEW: Ludo [2015]

2015/07/182015/07/20 Jared Mobarak

“Do you want to talk or play?” Called the national game of India by some, Pacisi has evolved throughout the centuries into multiple iterations. One of the most popular versions patented in England around 1896 is Ludo. Pretty much two to four players have four tokens each that they must race around the board in accordance to the number on the di they’ve rolled. Those in America will know it as Parcheesi, but the board isn’t quite the same. So when the game inscribed on a piece of leather finally…

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: The Gallows [2015]

2015/07/082015/07/09 Jared Mobarak

“He’s going to choke like Charlie” Something doesn’t add up. It does if coincidence is the name of the game (and it is), but that doesn’t make it plausible to accept any revelations Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing deliver in Act III of The Gallows. It’s not ruining anything to say a main character is the kid of a classmate of deceased teen Charlie who died during a high school play in 1993. The filmmakers meticulously ensure we know there are twenty years between that performance and the current one,…

REVIEW: La French [The Connection] [2014]

2015/06/162015/06/17 Jared Mobarak

“The true force of an untouchable is the silence he imposes on others” While everything out there talking about Cédric Jimenez’s La French [The Connection] takes special care to mention William Friedkin‘s classic The French Connection, the comparisons end at that titular focal point. I’m not talking about quality, though, as this unofficial companion is a very good piece of cinema. It’s just not an action thriller like the American rendition made in the thick of heroin’s 1970s heyday. Instead Jimenez and co-writer Audrey Diwan have crafted a straight mob…

REVIEW: The French Connection [1971]

2015/06/14 Jared Mobarak

“And I’m going to nail you for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie” You watch William Friedkin‘s The French Connection today and literally start thinking about the forty-four years of police-based action thrillers owing it a huge debt. The genre just doesn’t have the type of cultural or artistic clout these days to win the hardware it did back then: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Actor. (I don’t count The Departed because it was a blockbuster film with an all-star cast that went beyond cat…

REVIEW: San Andreas [2015]

2015/05/272015/05/29 Jared Mobarak

“Played a little tug-of-war with a car” Can you call a movie a disaster flick without the President of the United States declaring a state of emergency? While I ask in jest, we do expect such a sobering announcement to arrive with music soaring and heroic platitudes raining down. It never comes here, though, and its absence might be the best thing about San Andreas since it means the chaos inflicted on poor unsuspecting pixels pretending to be Californian cities doesn’t spread internationally. The shockwaves of this cataclysmic event surely…

REVIEW: Roar [1981]

2015/05/232015/05/25 Jared Mobarak

“They’re not trained cats. They’re just my friends.” Disparaging Roar as a film means nothing in the grand scheme of things when no one will ever watch it as a movie above the near-deadly document of misguided, Hollywood liberal stupidity it is. Drafthouse Films knew this when they decided to rerelease the infamous action/adventure thirty-five years after an abysmal box office debut of two million on a seventeen million budget over eleven years of production. Their tagline, (“No animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 cast and…

REVIEW: Mad Max: Fury Road [2015]

2015/05/132015/05/15 Jared Mobarak

“Our babies will not be warlords” It’s not often delays, financial dissolutions, and waning interest make a film better, but I don’t want to know what Mad Max: Fury Road might have been without them. In its current form the film embodies a logical escalation of what director George Miller began over three decades ago by embracing the insanity eating away at his titular road warrior’s resolve. Survival becomes a collective pursuit whether in the wastelands left behind after wars ravaged the earth of gasoline, water, humanity, and life itself…

REVIEW: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome [1985]

2015/05/102015/05/10 Jared Mobarak

“He can beat most men with his breath” It’s said that Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is based (without credit) on Russell Hoban‘s science fiction novel Riddley Walker. This could be true, but to my eye the finished product bears a striking resemblance to the 80s fantasy aesthetic thus far utilized during the decade. More of a parallel than to its own predecessors: low budget 70s cops and robbers actioner Mad Max and gritty dystopian epic The Road Warrior. Its first half in Bartertown is the Wild West of Star Wars‘…