Tag: Lenny Kravitz

REVIEW: Lee Daniel’s The Butler [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“To serving our country” I’d like to say it’s surprising how an Oscar nominated director like Lee Daniels can find trouble financing a film with the type of sprawling depiction of the civil rights movement The Butler (sorry Warner Bros., I’m ignoring your lawsuit) possesses, but one doesn’t have to look past the fact everything he’s done besides Precious was panned to understand why. The unfortunate death of original producer Laura Ziskin didn’t help matters either, but an innocuous tale that does history justice while not ruffling many feathers should…

Read More

REVIEW: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“Remember who the real enemy is” The aspect author Suzanne Collins included in Catching Fire that was more or less absent in The Hunger Games can be summed up with the above quote. While Panem’s dystopia provided a common antagonist for the surviving twelve districts of a revolution their Capital won seventy-four years previous, the series’ first installment relied almost exclusively upon whether its heroine Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) would survive her adversaries in the titular games. Yes, the political unrest was at the constructed mythology’s back, but the ultimate…

Read More

REVIEW: The Hunger Games [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Thank you for your consideration” Underdogs thrive on the ability to retain hope in a world forever shoving them into a corner without the reality of upward mobility or a true chance at overall social change. When they start to believe their numbers can actually overcome that adversity, however, the ruling class must take notice and ready for a fight they may not win. Rebellion will forever be a threat whether one has been squashed in the past or not since you can only kick the underprivileged masses down so…

Read More

REVIEW: Meeting People is Easy [1998]

Jared Mobarak

“Again, music to slit your wrists to” It was a batty animated music video lasting almost seven minutes for “Paranoid Android” that made me go out and buy OK Computer. Still in high school, I thought the album was the best thing I had ever heard and played it to death before finding out from a classmate that it was actually the band’s third disc. From there I experienced The Bends—my all-time favorite rock album—and with that Radiohead cemented its place at the top of my musical world. I made…

Read More

Top 100 Albums of 2011

Jared Mobarak

(short and sweet and to the point; culled from listening to 501 releases—at time of publishing—from 2011. ask me tomorrow and the list will probably be drastically different, but you have to lock ’em in sometime. click album cover for website) Honorable Mention:

Read More

Keith Schofield … Music Videography

Jared Mobarak

Keith Haverbrook, Eric Schoman & Jeff Mayfield make up the directing collective known as Keith Schofield. It’s an award-winning team from Los Angeles, CA that has been crafting very innovative music videos since 2004, almost all of which utilize some sort of camera trick, using the artifice of the medium to lend a unique visual quality. You could say they just take gimmicks such as depth perception illusions, multiple layering where the background is on a loop while the foreground continues forward, or a rigged focal point axis connected to…

Read More

REVIEW: Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire [2009]

Jared Mobarak

“A Day at the Shore” About halfway through watching Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire I started to think about another dark and dismal drama about abuse. The comparison to Requiem for a Dream was very hard to remove from my consciousness, both with the subject matter and the stylish way in which they are shot. Aronofsky really evolved the visceral assault aesthetic for his tale of drug abuse and I have to believe that director Lee Daniels was thinking just that when approaching Geoffrey Fletcher’s adapted screenplay.…

Read More