Month: March 2013

REVIEW: Satellite of Love [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“This is about friendship … and drinking” Now this was a surprise. Knowing absolutely nothing about Satellite of Love before sitting down to watch it, an opening carnival scene with the trio of Samuel (Nathan Phillips), Blake (Zachary Knighton), and Catherine (Shannon Lucio) left me in a quizzical state of being. Spindrift‘s “Red Reflection” was playing its slow guitar against the camera’s snaking journey through an amusement park promenade towards the group converged at a One-Shot Wins basketball hoop. High on some form of illicit drugs, Cat hangs off Sam’s…

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REVIEW: Tug [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“I peed? In the bed?” I guess this is what filmmaking becoming easier and cheaper does for all holding the dream and passion to create. It goes back to Kevin Smith‘s Clerks proving that the depiction of the comic and mundane of slacker culture could speak to a new generation feeling the exact same angst. We’ve always had films standing as a testament to an age of rebellion, maturity, and empathetic understanding—The Breakfast Club is probably the most famous—so it’s easy to see why today’s filmmakers yearn to match its…

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REVIEW: Wild Girl Waltz [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Have a drink whore” A self-proclaimed ‘hang out’ feature, Mark Lewis‘ Wild Girl Waltz is the kind of low budget comedy you don’t mind spending 82-minutes wading through sporadic nonsense for the laugh-out loud gems mixed within. Focused around Brian (Jared Stern), his sister Angie (Christina Shipp), and his girlfriend/her sorority sister Tara (Samantha Steinmetz) as they look to have some fun despite mundane existences caught too far away from both college and middle age, a couple unidentifiable pills of elicit pharmaceuticals can only help alleviate their boredom. But as…

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REVIEW: Oz the Great and Powerful [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“What’s the third up?” I have to reevaluate my distaste for everything Oz not existing inside the mind of Dorothy Gale now that I’ve discovered Victor Fleming’s seminal work The Wizard of Oz wasn’t as faithful to its source material as I once assumed. I could never ignore how the simple attempt to craft a prequel within a fictitious fantasy world was in direct opposition to what made the original so timeless and important to lost children yearning for more than they have. And then I read how L. Frank…

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REVIEW: About Sunny [Think of Me] [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“Think of something that makes you both happy” It’s intriguing to note how many buzzed about films depicting parents who don’t know how or simply can’t do the job were released on the festival circuit between 2010-2012. You don’t have to look far to see myriad examples of this concept right outside our doors as “babies are having babies” without the ability to stop being selfish so they can take on the responsibility. But while Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere and So Yong Kim‘s For Ellen have at their core a character…

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REVIEW: TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“They’re welcome to come and fail again” It was a bit of a fortuitous coincidence that I caught my girlfriend watching a TED Talk with Amanda Palmer called “The Art of Asking” a day before finally sitting down to Simon Klose‘s documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard. In the lecture Palmer poses a question with the potential to solve this whole copyright debacle: “How do we let people pay for music?” If you look at the business models of Kickstarter and Indiegogo and begin to understand consumers…

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Posterized Propaganda March 2013: ‘Stoker,’ ‘Place Beyond the Pines,’ ‘Spring Breakers’ & More

Jared Mobarak

“Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover” is a proverb whose simple existence proves the fact impressionable souls will do so without fail. This monthly column focuses on the film industry’s willingness to capitalize on this truth, releasing one-sheets to serve as not representations of what audiences are to expect, but as propaganda to fill seats. Oftentimes they fail miserably. I’m honestly not sure if it is possible to cram more movies in one 31-day period (five Fridays!). Let’s just say the dump month doldrums have ceased and we’ve moved…

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