Month: March 2016

REVIEW: Bølgen [The Wave] [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Can people in the area be warned in time?” I don’t love disaster films. In many cases the genre becomes a venue for explosive visual effects at the detriment of quality acting and resonate emotion. Hollywood loves including scientists for an environmentalist commentary, military personnel for a cold-hearted government angle, and the supposed little guy turned hero saving family. It’s always too much with the heroes always proving to be brawny fireman or first responders with God-complexes complementing their selfless empathy “in the moment”. We never get an actual “little…

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REVIEW: Triple 9 [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Better him than me” No matter how exciting it is to see a film with the cast John Hillcoat assembled on Triple 9, the old adage “less is more” still stands. The issue with having so many “main characters” is that they all end up becoming periphery players. And if one does rise above the rest, you wonder why so much happens that doesn’t concern him/her. This is where Matt Cook‘s 2010 Blacklist script falls into trouble: Casey Affleck‘s Chris Allen is our lead and yet he’s basically a pawn…

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REVIEW: 捉妖記 [Zhuō yāo jì] [Monster Hunt] [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“You gave birth to a white radish” Even if 捉妖記 [Zhuō Yāo Jì] [Monster Hunt] were billed in America with “from Raman Hui, the supervising animator of everyone’s favorite Dreamworks player the Gingerbread Man and co-director of Shrek the Third, comes a magical adventure of man and beast” on the posters, it wouldn’t be enough. But that’s okay because Hui didn’t make it for American audiences. Instead it stemmed from a desire back in 2005 to make an animated film in China after spending so much time with Steven Spielberg‘s…

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REVIEW: The Draughtsman’s Contract [1983]

Jared Mobarak

“Four garments and a ladder do not lead us to a corpse” It’s said Peter Greenaway‘s original cut of The Draughtman’s Contract came in at three hours before almost half the runtime was excised to deliver its theatrical form. I’m quite happy by this result because the lack of answers for its shadowy mysteries befits it. That’s not to say we cannot presume to know what’s occurred considering where each character ends up by its close, but to think the director actually gave answers is to imagine the fun ruined.…

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Top 100 Albums of 2015

Jared Mobarak

Honorable Mention Yelawolf – Love Story; Ceremony – The L-Shaped Man; The Tallest Man on Earth – Dark Bird is Home; Coldplay – A Head Full of Dreams; Logic – The Incredible True Story; Alberta Cross – Alberta Cross; Kaskade – Automatic; Marilyn Manson – The Pale Emperor; Blitzen Trapper – All Across This Land; Beach House – Thank Your Lucky Stars; Squarepusher – Damogen Furies; MisterWives – Our Own House; City and Colour – If I Should Go Before You; Robin Schulz – SUGAR; Matt and Kim – New…

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REVIEW: Sweetgrass [2009]

Jared Mobarak

“How can dogs like me if people don’t?” My first thought when John Ahern, Pat Connolly, and the rest of Lawrence Allested’s ranchers took off for the Montanan Absaroka-Beartooth mountains was: “There has to be a better way.” I know such a statement can be construed as demeaning to a way of life that existed since the nineteenth century for many Norwegian-Americans with grazing permits roaming the American West, but it’s less a response to the people as much as the endeavor’s extreme arduousness. You can’t help but respect these…

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REVIEW: Here Lies Joe [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“There is hope. There’s a way back to your life.” Only dying can bring two people lost and finished with the world back from the brink of death. That may not make sense to read, but it does in my head. I think maybe writer/director Mark Battle and cowriter Pamela Conway will understand as their film Here Lies Joe deals with the issue—the hope bred from a vacuum of sorrow. To be alone is to embrace the end, yet to attempt suicide is to be anything but alone. There are…

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REVIEW: El Club [The Club] [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Has it ever occurred to you that you’re a criminal?” This is a film about deafening silence and how one unexpected intrusion can turn the normalcy of its sequestered solitude on its head. It’s a silence we have seen before a couple months ago in Spotlight—there too it was extracted from secret penance to the penal system of public consciousness. Pablo Larraín‘s vision is on a much smaller scale although the ramifications are just as brutally blunt and far-reaching. For him the issue wasn’t exposing the crimes of Catholic priests…

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REVIEW: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover [1989]

Jared Mobarak

“The naughty bits and the dirty bits are so close together” The above quote pretty much sums up Peter Greenaway‘s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. High society and criminal filth: seemingly disparate sectors of civilization that wouldn’t truly wish to consort together yet constantly overlap through history to almost merge into one. The surface context of the words concerns a conversation about the close proximity between genitals and anuses during dinner as only the boorishly crude gangster Albert Spita (Michael Gambon) could describe, but it also…

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Top Ten Films of 2015: Where emotions run high

Jared Mobarak

I have no problem saying 2015 was a great year for cinema. Putting together a Top Ten was difficult at every turn—both because each time I had to do so meant I had seen more films and as a result of my preferences constantly changing. There are more than a few from 11-20 that easily could be Top Ten candidates on a different day. Sadly for them that day isn’t today. Happily for us: the art’s level of quality was good enough to cause such problems. Rules: eligible feature-length films…

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REVIEW: Saul fia [Son of Saul] [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“You failed the living for the dead” It’s stunning how all these years later a Holocaust film can come along and prove wholly unique from the myriad examples we’ve already received and lauded. But László Nemes‘ directorial debut Saul Fia [Son of Saul] does exactly that. Not only does he capture the brutality by entering into the bowels of 1944 Auschwitz amongst the men and women going to their deaths in the showers or the pits, he somehow exposes the numbness felt by those forced to assist the Nazis in…

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