Richard LaGravenese | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Beloved [1998]

2017/10/242020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all. Love creates and destroys. Mix in post-traumatic stress disorder and you’ll never know which until it’s too late. Evil can permeate your soul and color your psychology in ways that merge right and wrong into a singular goal seeking survival. To endure horror is to alter everything you were, your innocence lost no matter how hard you try to reclaim it. The thought of experiencing the nightmare again—or having it find you within a place you believed safe—is enough…

REVIEW: The Last Five Years [2015]

2015/02/082015/02/11 Jared Mobarak

“I will not lose because you can’t win.” I wanted to blame The Last Five Years‘ failure on the original musical’s creator Jason Robert Brown since director Richard LaGravenese and cast can only do so much if the material is lacking. But then I learned about a huge structural detour that occurred during the adaptation process. Whereas the Off-Broadway show consisted of solos—Cathy’s (Anna Kendrick) beginning with the end of their relationship intertwined with beau Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) from the start, meeting just once at the midpoint’s wedding—the film delivers…

REVIEW: Unbroken [2014]

2014/12/172014/12/21 Jared Mobarak

“If you can take it you can make it” Universal Pictures has possessed the rights to Louie Zamperini’s life story since 1957 with good cause considering its scope spanning a troubled childhood, Olympic glory, and POW torture at the hands of the Japanese during WWII. Only when Laura Hillenbrand‘s mouthful of a book Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption came out in 2010 was traction finally found assumedly in large part due to her previous adaptation at the hands of Hollywood, Seabiscuit, earning seven Oscar…

REVIEW: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty [2013]

2014/01/102014/01/11 Jared Mobarak

“I always save your knick-knacks” What began as a 1939 short story by James Thurber debuting in The New Yorker, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty found its way to the big screen in 1947 led by Danny Kaye. The tale of a daydreamer losing himself in excitingly heroic fantasies while sleepwalking through a daytrip of chores in the city with his wife expanded into a magazine editor finding more interest in the pulp stories he reads than the drab life he leads. It’s a conceit mirrored today with Mitty…

REVIEW: Beautiful Creatures [2013]

2013/02/062013/08/07 Jared Mobarak

“You can either run or shoot” Just like clockwork the Twilight series has found a successor. Trading vampires and werewolves for witches, authors Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl‘s Caster Chronicles‘ has hit theatres with much less fanfare but perhaps more intrigue. Gatlin, South Carolina’s secrets are a mixture of Hogwart’s affinity for the Muggle world and Bella’s supernatural-heavy Seattle backyard—the casters possessing a division of light and dark like Voldemort’s Death Eaters and Dumbledore’s students as well as rites of passage similar to those of Jacob’s pack and Edward’s ‘vegetarian’…