Tag: The Killing

REVIEW: The Killing [1956]

Jared Mobarak

Just a bad joke without a punch line. After test screenings left audiences confused and frustrated, writer/director Stanley Kubrick and producing partner James B. Harris decided to return to the edit bay and turn The Killing‘s overlapping, repetitious structure into a more linear A-to-B narrative. You can’t blame the former for wanting to do everything possible to make the film a hit since it was his first project with a real budget positioning his career forward (he’d disavowed Fear and Desire as amateurish and sophomore effort Killer’s Kiss proved almost…

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Babel’s Patti Smith and her “monastic mess”

Jared Mobarak

After waxing on about the “Lovecraftian” look of downtown Buffalo—the morning’s fog still hadn’t lifted by 6:45pm during my drive along the 190 to Kleinhans—Patti Smith disarmed the largest crowd in Just Buffalo Literary Center‘s Babel history with the words: “If you get bored or tired just tell me. We can talk about anything.” It’s amazing how honest they felt, especially in context with a lecture season seeming more like a publicity tour than look into the minds of artists. Smith conversely arrived to give us a piece of her…

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TIFF13 REVIEW: Mystery Road [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“How’d he know it was a wild one, Jay?” Originally conjured up by writer/director Ivan Sen in 2006, Mystery Road’s look at a “turncoat” cop working within a largely racist, white profession always had Australian television actor Aaron Pedersen in mind for the lead. Years passed, locales shifted, and the end result is finally hitting theaters as a sort of contemporary western set in the outback home of a returning detective years removed after a stint in the city. Not only an outcast with his peers—each quick to ensure his…

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REVIEW: Top of the Lake, Parts 1-3 [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“You know, you were my first kiss. Was I yours?” A young boy on a bus—this is the indelible mark left by the first three episodes of Jane Campion and Gerard Lee‘s miniseries Top of the Lake and it sticks less than five minutes in. Anonymous throughout these three hours of crime drama, this boy is the only one who seems to care about twelve-year old Tui (Jacqueline Joe) after she walks into their small New Zealand town’s cursed lake. His text “R U OK” goes answered as she is…

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