Tag: Bashir Salahuddin

REVIEW: Top Gun: Maverick [2022]

Jared Mobarak

It’s time to let go. Director Joseph Kosinski pays homage to the late Tony Scott by opening his thirty-plus-years-in-the-making sequel Top Gun: Maverick with the exact same music cues, similarly propulsive aircraft carrier b-roll, and text-based intro (adding “and women” to “the handful of men”) as Top Gun. Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” kicks in to whisk us back to the 1980s if only for a couple minutes before entering an aging Navy garage with Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell (Tom Cruise). His dogfighting days over the Indian Ocean are over. After…

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REVIEW: Cyrano [2021]

Jared Mobarak

My fate is to love her from afar. We were about three songs into Joe Wright‘s Cyrano when my partner and I looked at each other and said, almost in unison, “These songs are pretty bad.” I don’t need rhymes (and especially not ones as rudimentary as “know” and “go” and “Cyrano” back-to-back-to-back), but I’d love some sort of dynamism to make me believe there was a reason someone wanted to turn Edmond Rostand‘s “Cyrano de Bergerac” into a musical. What about the material screamed song? What kind of exciting…

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REVIEW: A Simple Favor [2018]

Jared Mobarak

Oopsy. You don’t wonder which woman has secrets after meeting Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) and Emily Nelson (Blake Lively). Instead you wonder which has more. They’re built to be hiding something in their past whether dark or not. The former: a goody two-shoes, little Miss Perfect type who always has the energy to show up every parent at her kid’s school despite a tragic accident that took the life of her husband and brother. The latter: a hard-drinking enigma who refuses to let people take her photo with a heart…

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