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REVIEW: バケモノの子 [Bakemono no ko] [The Boy and the Beast] [2015]

2016/02/262016/03/02 Jared Mobarak

“Find the meaning on your own” Two worlds collide once young Kyuta (Shôta Sometani) and warrior Kumatetsu (Kôji Yakusho) meet in Mamoru Hosoda‘s バケモノの子 [Bakemono no ko] [The Boy and the Beast]. The former was recently orphaned after his mother’s death (she had divorced his father years ago and her family refuses to get in touch with him), currently working his way towards becoming a solitary street urchin full of dark rage aimed at the human race for causing him such pain. The latter is a candidate to replace the…

TIFF15 REVIEW: かくれんぼ [Hide & Seek] [2015]

2015/09/092015/09/16 Jared Mobarak

“I can’t be like mom” There are no easy answers when it comes to psychological and emotional conditions. What a “normal” person believes to be so easy could very well prove impossible for another no matter how mundane or seemingly harmless the task might appear. Kimie Tanaka‘s short かくれんぼ [Hide & Seek] depicts this struggle via a young man named Kotaro (Kuniaki Nakamura) who hasn’t left his home in over a decade. Shut-in his room except to use the bathroom, he even waits until his mother (Sachiko Matsuura‘s Mitsuko) leaves…

FANTASIA15 REVIEW: リアル鬼ごっこ [Riaru onigokko] [Tag] [2015]

2015/08/082018/01/03 Jared Mobarak

“Watch the ripple” If リアル鬼ごっこ [Tag] were any indication of writer/director Sion Sono‘s warped mind, I’d almost believe he films without rhyme or reason besides excess. Based upon the Japanese novel Riaru onigokko by Yûsuke Yamada—coined by some as the Stephen King of Japan—this surreal tale of three girls in one traversing a nightmarish landscape of evil pursuers taking whatever form is most absurd lives on the edge of falling into complete randomness. You have to embrace the ride or else you’ll check out very early on because while watching…

REVIEW: 思い出のマーニー [Omoide no Mânî] [When Marnie Was There] [2014]

2015/06/11 Jared Mobarak

“I wish for a normal life everyday” If Studio Ghibli ends up closing shop as announced, we can be glad their final film is a winner with the heart and soul we’ve come to love from Hayao Miyazaki and the team. I’m surely in the minority, but I’d even say Hiromasa Yonebayaski‘s When Marnie Was There is better than last year’s Oscar nominee The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. While bringing the aesthetic back to the studio’s customary style a la Spirited Away does remove some of the awe Isao…

REVIEW: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter [2015]

2015/04/212015/04/22 Jared Mobarak

“Solitude? Just fancy loneliness.” It’s easy to assume Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter will be a humorous adventure of cultural dissonance upon reading its synopsis. The conceit is ripe for comedy and David and Nathan Zellner do mine that arena throughout their drama when it suits the story, but it’s a nuanced tragedy that’s ultimately delivered. How could the tale of a twenty-nine year old Japanese office worker stumbling upon a hidden VHS copy of Fargo, thinking it a treasure map to a suitcase full of cash, be tragic? Quite easily—even…

TIFF14 REVIEW: Oh Lucy! [2014]

2014/09/012018/04/17 Jared Mobarak

“Don’t get involved if she calls” You know you’re in a rut when your sister calls to tell you not to talk to your niece and you do everything you can to do just that in the hopes of some semblance of excitement—or at the very least change. So chain-smoking Setsuko (Kaori Momoi) ditches work at the much younger Yu’s (Rian Nagashima) request to grab dinner and hear her proposition despite the warning. Needing money, Yu is looking for someone to take her place in an English course so she…

REVIEW: そして父になる [Like Father, Like Son] [2013]

2014/02/192014/02/19 Jared Mobarak

“Now it all makes sense” After recently reading that Hirokazu Koreeda’s そして父になる [Like Father, Like Son] had been optioned by Dreamworks for an English language reboot, I can’t help but imagine how ineffective it will be in comparison to the Japanese original. A lot of what works in this tale of a father struggling to figure out whether time or blood makes a child yours goes hand-in-hand with the nation’s culture. I don’t see an American possessing the conservative mindset necessary to think six years with a child is meaningless…

REVIEW: Cutie and the Boxer [2013]

2014/02/07 Jared Mobarak

“The average one has to support the genius” TV producer Zachary Heinzerling may have set out to make a documentary about two artists, but what he filmed was love. Not the storybook love of a man sweeping a woman off her feet to live happily ever after in piece, harmony, and financial stability, though. No, for Noriko Shinahara and Ushio Shinohara—the titular Cutie and the Boxer—love meant pain, suffering, poverty, and the unwavering, inexplicable connection that never broke between them. There was some sweeping—Ushio was a forty-one year old action…

TIFF13 REVIEW: R100 [2013]

2013/09/112013/09/16 Jared Mobarak

“Is that an earthquake?” What do you get when you cross one of Japan’s most influential comedians, a premise similar to The Game but with a zany wild streak of subversive humor, and a whole lot of S&M? The answer is Hitoshi Matsumoto‘s R100, a film following the mild-mannered Takafumi (Nao Ohmori) as he descends into a world of painful pleasure the likes of which he wasn’t prepared of course. Similar in tone to his previous film Scabbard Samurai, I fortunately didn’t have to worry about bridging the cultural divide…

NYAFF12 REVIEW: Saya-zamurai [Scabbard Samurai] [2011]

2012/07/012014/04/23 Jared Mobarak

“Why did it have to rain?” Sometimes foreign language films simply exist across an insurmountable cultural divide that renders them indecipherable here. Hitoshi Matsumoto‘s Saya-zamurai [Scabbard Samurai] perfectly exemplifies through an obtusely constructed first third before hitting its stride. Comically uneven at the start, I was left scratching my head and wondering if I was missing the joke. An old, toothless samurai with an empty scabbard breathlessly and wordlessly runs through the Japanese countryside with his young daughter following closely behind as three assassins—introduced in freeze-frame—arrive to inflict what should…

REVIEW: 鋼の錬金術師嘆きの丘（ミロス）の聖なる星 [Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos] [2011]

2012/01/232014/05/15 Jared Mobarak

“The myths of the Milosian people are stained in blood” Anime truly is a breed of its own and a genre not to be trifled with by the weak at heart. Just take the popular saga of “Fullmetal Alchemist” and the amount of work created from Hiromu Arakawa‘s world. Spawning two separate television series adapted from the same original manga, both incarnations were also graced with a film to accompany their parallel journeys of the brothers Elric—Edward and Alphonse. Whereas Conqueror of Shamballa trailed the original run as a wrap…