Tag: Odessa Young

TIFF21 REVIEW: Mothering Sunday [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I just wanted everyone to keep playing. Mother’s Day, 1924: a day for servant girls to ride the train home to their mothers and wealthy mothers to have brunch with their children. Except that a post-WWI England could no longer guarantee such things. Even those who still had the opportunity to forget wouldn’t quite be able to shake the generally sense of sorrow permeating the memory of all those sons who died. Marriage announcements hold the bittersweet truths that the groom should have been someone else. Breakfasts carry a quiet…

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REVIEW: Shirley [2020]

Jared Mobarak

I don’t smote. What if instead of one night, Nick and Honey were entrenched in hosts Martha and George’s toxic manipulations for six months? Edward Albee‘s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would have progressed much differently if only because everyone would need to eventually sober up, confronting each other in the light of day with clear heads and accusatory eyes. Maybe there’d be regret and remorse or maybe things would pick up where they were left to expose how alcohol only helped to disseminate truths that were going to be…

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REVIEW: A Million Little Pieces [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Get it right the first time, James. During the ensuing fallout once James Frey‘s memoir A Million Little Pieces was exposed as a fabrication well beyond his statement admitting to having altered “small details” of his past, it was discovered that the author had tried getting it published as fiction to no avail. Random House, the place that ultimately printed it and watched its ascent to the number one bestseller slot thanks to a coveted spot on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club list, was supposedly one of the establishments that rejected…

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TIFF19 REVIEW: The Giant [2020]

Jared Mobarak

You can’t run from where we’ve been. Places, objects, sounds, and smells each retain shimmers of memory we long to hold and struggle to forget. This is what’s happened to Charlotte’s (Odessa Young) childhood home—the place where her mother took her own life. Whether she hasn’t thought of it in a long time or it’s all she ever thinks about, this moment right now sees it taking control of her senses and refusing to let go. The lights in these nightmares extend out in a hazy blur, everything so much…

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