Month: June 2016

REVIEW: Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“The cherry blossom and the sharp sword. Humility and arrogance.” Director Mark Cousins leaves us with a quote at the end of his experimental documentary composed solely of archival video and audio entitled Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise. It’s by W.G. Sebald and reads: “We gaze at it in wonder, which in itself is a form of dawning horror.” The description is apt, especially as I found myself basking in the beauty of these mushroom clouds forming in the sky with austerity despite the carnage left behind. There’s wonder…

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REVIEW: Warcraft [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“From light comes darkness and from darkness light” As of a year ago I didn’t know what MMO meant (massively multiplayer online) and only an hour ago learned “World of Warcraft” didn’t always exist as one. Warcraft has actually been around since 1994 as a real-time strategy game without avatars and networking. There was a storyline before sprawling into the ever-expanding phenomenon it’s become, a beginning to this war between humans and orcs that continues to wage decades later. Duncan Jones‘ film is therefore an adaptation of this original history…

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REVIEW: The Conjuring 2 [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“This is the closest to Hell I ever want to go” When a formula succeeds as well as that of James Wan‘s The Conjuring and its real life subjects have as extensive a Rolodex of haunting investigations as Ed and Lorraine Warren, the prospect of a sequel arrives as both inevitability and an initial pause. Generally these types of projects change creative hands early so studios can rush ahead without worrying about scheduling conflicts, but Wan has never been one to shy away from involvement on subsequent entries to his…

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REVIEW: The Lobster [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“That is none of your concern” Writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos‘ English language debut The Lobster is a dystopian sci-fi romance depicting a world where Paula Abdul doesn’t exist. If these mechanical creatures devoid of emotion heard her 1988 single “Opposites Attract” their woes of the heart might be eased. I say this because while life is hazardous to your health without someone to share it, Lanthimos’ non-descript City strictly inhabited by couples is impossible to traverse without that someone also sharing your “defining characteristic”. To be a match is to be…

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REVIEW: Les demoiselles de Rochefort [The Young Girls of Rochefort] [1967]

Jared Mobarak

“The illusion of love is only love unseen” The fair is in town and love is in the air. Welcome to Rochefort—a little seaside navy town in France full of sumptuously bright colors and plenty of light-footed citizens ready to dance accompaniment for anyone willing to belt their hearts out in song. It’s a harbinger of unrequited love, lost love, and dreamers seeking an ideal they aren’t sure reality possesses. Tourists come and go, laughter is shared, and natives seem to always gravitate back after adventures abroad. The city beckoned…

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REVIEW: Dark [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I didn’t like what I saw” It’s summer 2003 and the entire Northeast is about to go Dark. I lost seeing Radiohead as a result of that blackout—my tickets for the weekend’s Toronto show postponed a few months later to an exam night the next semester. Some people had it better with nothing going awry besides losing some perishables in the fridge; other had it worse. How much worse is up to the people who experienced it or those like screenwriter Elias and director Nick Basile seeking to use that…

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REVIEW: A Bigger Splash [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Try not to frighten the horses” More than loosely based upon Alain Page‘s 1969 French script La Piscine, Luca Guadagnino finally follows up his magnificent I Am Love with A Bigger Splash, his first narrative fiction since. It tells the story of a rockstar legend (Tilda Swinton‘s Marianne Lane channeling Ziggy Stardust) and her long-term documentarian boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts‘ Paul De Smedt) as they vacation on a secluded Italian island for much needed recovery—she post-vocal surgery and he not so far removed from a violent suicide attempt spurred by alcoholism.…

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REVIEW: Careful What You Wish For [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“This guy looks like he’d hit a child” The real mystery is how Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum‘s Careful What You Wish For got itself a theatrical release in the first place—no matter how limited. I’m not surprised Starz Digital is handling distribution, though, since it feels exactly like a late night pay cable ticket sanitized to an R-rating for lustful eroticism rather than actual chemistry, nudity, or plausibility. Sometimes thrillers of the “youthful stalker hits the sexual jackpot” variety can at least be entertaining in an ironic way, but that’s unfortunately…

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REVIEW: Honeyglue [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I meant stay” It’s a story about a dragonfly and the princess bee—a girl with terminal cancer and the boy to which she falls love with only three months left to live respectively. Their love exists in a sort of vacuum beyond time, a reality of the now regardless of future or past before them. She (Adriana Mather‘s Morgan) is but a woman unhindered by her middle class upbringing and conservative lifestyle. He (Zach Villa‘s Jordan) a sensitive soul, fluid in gender, appearance, and desires, who just so happened to…

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