Month: January 2017

SUNDANCE17 REVIEW: Axolotl Overkill [2017]

Jared Mobarak

“Can you drown in the gene pool?” Playwright, author, screenwriter, and director Helene Hegemann has said (through her publisher) that, “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.” The words were spoken after her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill earned critical praise, a spot as a finalist for a major book award, and multiple, potentially damning plagiarism claims. Hegemann was seventeen when it published and admitted to the cribbing as soon as it was brought to light. She blamed her generation’s penchant for mixing and sampling, for taking what’s bouncing…

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REVIEW: A Soldier’s Song [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Can’t say” The Civil War in America was insane to comprehend in this nation historically because family members fought family members in close. This was a war waged with bayonets and bullets rather than bombs and drones. To join one side knowing someone you love was on the other meant you were willing to meet them on the battlefield and pull the trigger—not for yourself to survive, but for the cause and the man next to you. To show sympathy is to risk tragedy so the guilt of killing your…

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REVIEW: Silence [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“An army of two” A labor of love twenty-five years in the making, Silence is tailor-made for Martin Scorsese‘s sensibilities as a person and director. Not only does it comment on faith and therefore his personal struggles being someone who contemplated going down the road towards priesthood, it also provides similar subject matter and plot progression to his most famous religion-based drama The Last Temptation of Christ. This epic journey is ostensibly the last temptation of Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), a Jesuit priest striving to cultivate Catholicism in Japan at…

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REVIEW: The Story of 90 Coins [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“I will prove my love and determination to you” Here’s an interesting film that’s beautiful to look at and well acted, but built on a story steeped in a notion the twenty first century doesn’t and shouldn’t accept. It could be a lost in translation situation wherein gender roles and patriarchal ideals remain stuck in an archaic past within China, but I have a fundamental issue with how Bai Xuedan‘s script The Story of 90 Coins presents its central conflict. Liwei Jian shoots it with skill, Michael Wong directs with…

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REVIEW: Gary From Accounting [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“I think I left my oven on so I’m going to …” Drinking problems are a serious matter. Alcoholics neglect their families, careers, and their own health as they walk through life in a haze towards their next glass. It’s hard to reach someone suffering from this disease without the cold hard truth. So you stage an intervention to facilitate your laying everything out. “This is how your actions affect me—him, her, and you.” The hope is that this bombardment of emotions and love can jolt someone out of his/her…

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REVIEW: Saving Banksy [2017]

Jared Mobarak

“The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist—unless it makes a profit” I love Banksy‘s work most because of how it comments on the commodification of art. Here’s a world-renowned master who refuses to authenticate anything he’s done on the street—his canvas of choice. He does this as a stand for the form, for what graffiti has always been. The pieces he stencils are site-specific both in the sense of the wall and the country for which he’s commenting politically.…

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REVIEW: The Bye Bye Man [2017]

Jared Mobarak

“Don’t think it. Don’t say it.” A horror movie slated to open in October means buzz and solid expectations. It used to be you didn’t see the genre at any other time—back before studios discovered how cheap they were to produce and how palatable they were to teens looking for something to do on a Friday night whether it proved enjoyably worthwhile or not. Securing this coveted spot was therefore a win for STX Entertainment and their film The Bye Bye Man, either through hard work or sheer luck. Watching…

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REVIEW: Live By Night [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“We don’t get to pick our sins” A scene happens early on in Live by Night where Deputy Police Captain Thomas Coughlin (Brendan Gleeson) tells his criminal son Joe (Ben Affleck) that our actions always add up to a conclusion for which we can never predict. The idea is that Joe is a good man—a war veteran with a good heart—who’s simply been disillusioned. Thomas is willing to not crackdown on him despite being fully aware of how his boy makes a living as long as the evidence doesn’t force…

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REVIEW: 君の名は。 [Kimi no na wa.] [Your Name.] [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“That day when the stars came falling” I had no idea what to expect upon sitting down to 君の名は。[Kimi no na wa.] [Your Name.] and the first few minutes definitely had my head spinning. We’re ushered in via the voiceover narration of two high schoolers we’ve yet to properly meet in Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi) and Taki (Ryûnosuke Kamiki). They speak about dreams as a rare comet shoots across the blue sky. It’s cryptic, beautiful, and utterly fascinating—a subdued tone easing us in before a kinetic collage of vignettes without context…

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Top 100 Songs of 2016

Jared Mobarak

#100: Pacifico by Majid Jordan #98: Swooner by The Zolas #96: Come Alive by The Jezabels #94: Faint Of Heart by Tegan & Sara #92: So Much Sky by The Temper Trap #90: Touch by Shura #88: Sometimes by Oscar #86: Hell’s Kitchen Angel by MAX #84: Drive It Like You Stole It by Sing Street #82: Zombies by Childish Gambino #80: Someone That Loves You (ft. Izzy Bizu) by HONNE #78: Your Love by Cardiknox #76: Fight Song by Rachel Platten #74: Call You Up by Viola Beach #72:…

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REVIEW: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Rebellions are built on hope” George Lucas used to say years ago that the original Star Wars trilogy was but three chapters of an epic nine-part saga. It dealt with the Skywalker family, beginning in the middle to introduce a passing of the “Force” from father to son. Lucas would eventually make the first three chapters as a prequel series used to tell the tale of Anakin Skywalker’s descent towards the Dark Side for exposition into the stunning reveal his becoming Luke and Leia’s formidable foe in A New Hope…

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