Tag: Julie Christie

REVIEW: Billy Liar [1963]

Jared Mobarak

“Today’s a day of big decisions” When you live in a small town where everyone knows your name, flights of fancy can prove your only escape. Not everyone imagines a whole country to forget him/herself in when times get tough, but Billy Fisher (Tom Courtenay) is a one-of-a-kind guy. You can’t even blame him since fantasies of unearned heroics and power do sound better than a sedentary life at home with nagging (for good reason) parents (Wilfred Pickles‘ Geoffrey and Mona Washbourne‘s Alice) and at work as a mortuary clerk.…

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TIFF12 REVIEW: The Company You Keep [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“We made mistakes, but we were right” In Robert Redford and Lem Dobbs‘ adaptation of Neil Gordon‘s novel The Company You Keep, the personal futures fought for by the militant Weather Underground during the Vietnam War risk being destroyed as the last surviving members of a Bank of Michigan robbery find their past catching up to them after thirty years. Hidden with new identities and normal, domestic lives far from the bombings and murders of a previous era, they’ve begun to take stock and find the guilt of what they…

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REVIEW: Red Riding Hood [2011]

Jared Mobarak

“All sorrows are less with bread” Why, in movies, does a thrown axe/sword/dagger/knife always land squarely in the back of one’s opponent as he’s about to maim? Can’t it comically thud to the ground, short the half revolution necessary to inflict injury, allowing the antagonist to look at the camera with a twinkle in his eye before clawing the heroine’s face off? I know its Hollywood and audiences have preconceptions about good versus evil and all, but realistic physics mixed with plausible probability may help something called authenticity. But what…

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REVIEW: Away From Her [2007]

Jared Mobarak

“Something delicious in oblivion” Canadian actress Sarah Polley has crafted a tale about love in the midst of great adversity by adapting a short story into her new film Away From Her. I have been a fan of hers, acting-wise, for a few years now since Go, and was pleasantly surprised to see that she had written and directed a film garnering a lot of good buzz. What she tells here is a story about an older couple grappling with the wife’s slow deterioration from Alzheimer’s. Although there is little…

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