Month: January 2016

REVIEW: Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Claude used to be a friend of mine—he no longer is.” Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah is a document of a documentarian: a time capsule of the twelve-year gestation of what’s possibly the greatest non-fiction works in cinematic history. Shoah‘s a ten-hour look at the Holocaust’s devastation via survivors and perpetrators in varying modes of interview whether out in the open or through hidden cameras, so no one would believe its director if he told Adam Benzine stories about the wonderful experience had during its creation. His was a…

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REVIEW: Body Team 12 [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“My life is a sacrifice for the country to succeed” For Americans the Ebola scare was a handful of cases and nurses who weren’t as careful as they should have been. To the world it was thousands upon thousands of dead bodies—loved ones that family members can’t normally mourn because every second the deceased’s blood lays in the streets is an extra second risking greater contamination. It’s easy to forget the scope of epidemics like this when ground zero isn’t in our own backyard. We blame countries for being inferior,…

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REVIEW: Panique au village [A Town Called Panic] [2009]

Jared Mobarak

“Your car is completely broken” Based on the animated series of the same name, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar‘s feature length Panique au village [A Town Called Panic] is a far cry from short five-minute skits. With that said, it’s easy to see how it was born from such a format considering the irreverent humor running rampant through its comedy of errors connected by the thinnest layer of glue. This is how they travel from a celebratory night of birthday festivities for Horse (Patar) to the undersea theft of brick…

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REVIEW: Alles wird gut [Everything Will Be Okay] [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“We’ve come too far to turn back” It’s interesting how the phrase “everything will be okay” carries such a stigma of pandering deflection now. The words are for all intents and purposes meaningless in their true context, transformed instead to connote a sense of insecurity through hopeful platitudes without any sense of whether or not the situation will resolve itself in an “okay” manner at all. We try to soothe by saying it, but I’d argue we actually instill more trepidation. So when I saw the title of Patrick Vollrath‘s…

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REVIEW: Day One [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“This is my first job” It’s just too much: too manipulative, too familiar, and too convenient. The trouble with Henry Hughes‘ Day One all stems from one line when his American military unit’s new interpreter Feda (Layla Alizada) meets her predecessor Naz (Shari Vasseghi). They speak about being away from home and family in the context of their being wives—a legitimate concern with the Muslim religion holding a woman akin to property with which to serve her husband, but overly “feminine” as only a male writer could write (despite the…

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REVIEW: Shok [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“It’s not about the bike” There’s no more poignant way to tell a tale of war than through the eyes of children. This is what writer/director Jamie Donoughue does with Shok, a short film set during the Kosovo War between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (spearheaded by the Serbians) and the Kosovo Liberation Army at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than show battlefield gunfire and nameless bodies falling before new soldiers can take their place, he enters a tiny village to meet best friends Oki (Andi Bajgora) and…

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REVIEW: Stutterer [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m calling about my bill” We all have something about us to be embarrassed about. Some have more than one. While most see it as a major distraction no one could ever endure, however, this is rarely the case. Or at least with those you’d want to be around anyway. Few things in this arena are worse than stuttering—some might even say deafness and blindness are easier to cope with because they are definitive. You cannot speak or you cannot see; there’s no sense of deficiency. To stutter is the…

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REVIEW: Ave Maria [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Jews have violated the Virgin!” Director Basil Khalil and co-writer Daniel Yáñez have come up with a cutely comic conceit for their short film Ave Maria. It’s the West Bank—miles from civilization—and a car carrying a Jewish man, his wife, and his mother crashes into a Catholic church run by five Arab nuns who have taken a vow of silence. If everyone follows the rites of their religion, the women able to help the family mustn’t talk and the family, who realize that it’s now the Shabbat, can’t operate any…

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REVIEW: Prologue [2015]

Jared Mobarak

I wasn’t sure what I was watching once Richard Williams‘ Prologue moved past its carefully drawn flower pollinated by a bee and a butterfly soaring across the screen to wipe the page clean before introducing the sharp eyes of soldiers. Their shields and spears conjured thoughts of Sparta; the lack of clothing on the men a character study of anatomy. To me there seemed no purpose other than that: to show the human body engaged in warfare to brutal effect. But then a little girl is seen, her innocence lost…

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REVIEW: Mi ne mozhem zhit bez kosmosa [We Can’t Live Without Cosmos] [2015]

Jared Mobarak

The title may be Mi ne mozhem zhit bez kosmosa [We Can’t Live Without Cosmos], but the thing Konstantin Bronzit shows we really can’t live without is love. I don’t mean romantic love either; I mean the bond between two human beings whether by blood or not. A kinship like what’s cultivated in the military wherein soldiers come home brothers despite leaving as strangers. To find someone to confide in and follow hand-in-hand through life no matter age, trajectory, or location isn’t something to take lightly. For many a friend…

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REVIEW: Historia de un oso [Bear Story] [2014]

Jared Mobarak

While Gabriel Osorio Vargas‘ Chilean short film Historia de un oso [Bear Story] tells the tale of a sad, lonely old bear, it does ultimately prove uplifting. Here’s a creature tinkering tirelessly in his shop to put the finishing touches on what could very well be his life’s work and yet any and all success or failure is met with silence. There’s no one else in his small home to celebrate or lament—just the indentations of two bodies on his mattress permanently displaying that love and company existed not too…

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