Toronto International Film Festival | www.jaredmobarak.com

TIFF18 REVIEW: The Third Wife [2018]

2018/09/212020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

One day you’ll like it for real. It’s 19th century Vietnam and fourteen-year old May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My) has just been married to a wealthy landowner named Hung (Long Le Vu). She wears a genuine smile on her face, this next chapter in life as hopeful as it is scary. She has two other women to help steer her through womanhood, motherhood, and sexual pleasure (Nu Yên-Khê Tran‘s first wife Ha and Mai Thu Huong Maya‘s second wife Xuan) and a future of comfort awaiting her with but one…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Las niñas bien [The Good Girls] [2018]

2018/09/202020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

So happy. We’re so happy. Sofía Hernandez (Ilse Salas) has everything: three children she can ignore, servants and maids to take care of her every whim, and a husband (Flavio Medina‘s Fernando) who inherited his wealth from his father and still has yet to really work for it thanks to Uncle Javier (Diego Jáuregui) managing things like he always had. Theirs is a charmed life of opulence and excess wherein they can afford to treat aristocratic etiquette and tradition as sacrosanct while “new money” commoners try to enter their social…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Posledice [Consequences] [2018]

2018/09/202020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

I am what I am. Andrej (Matej Zemljic) is an eighteen-year old abuser. He’s stopped going to school, started getting into fights, disrespects his parents, and most recently hit a teen after she berated him for his not wanting sex. It’s an escalating series of incidents that no one is willing to deal with anymore, so they decide to let a judge handle him instead. The verdict: a detention center for troubled youths with 24/7 security, education, workshops, and free weekends (if you don’t do something to lose those days…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Saf [2018]

2018/09/182020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Everybody lies. America isn’t the only country with a portion of its population rejecting refugee clemency (although it’s the most high profile due to international stature, economic wealth, and so-called Christian charity). It’s also not the only one blinded to its hate when confronting the matter. Because that’s what it is to look down on someone worse off than you: hate. Blaming immigrants for “stealing” jobs and “ruining” neighborhoods exemplifies resentment. Just because your community backs this thought process doesn’t make it any less a product of bigotry, racism, and…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Il vizio della speranza [The Vice of Hope] [2018]

2018/09/172020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Remember, misery isn’t the only thing that exists. Less than an hour from Naples, Italy is Castel Volturno, a place marred by newspaper headlines like “Forsaken Village” and “Sex, Drugs, and the Mafia.” It shouldn’t surprise then that director Edoardo De Angelis would use it as the setting for his latest film Il vizio della speranza [The Vice of Hope] considering child trafficking and prostitution are prevalently at its back. These criminal enterprises are presented as this comune’s means for financial stability, everywhere we’re taken openly servicing one or both…

TIFF18 REVIEW: First Man [2018]

2018/09/152020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

It’s kinda neat The non-controversy surrounding Damien Chazelle‘s First Man shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows how political parties have appropriated art into their agendas since the dawn of time. Of course they’d glom onto the decision to ignore the lunar flag planting as some “un-American” thing rather than read the script, watch the movie, or ask for clarification—options which would have all supplied insight into the reality that Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer aren’t telling the story of the moon landing. That goal might be the driving force behind what’s…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Rojo [2018]

2018/09/152020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

They say bodies appear in the desert. The film opens as people leave a house with objects in-hand, the assumption being that they were bought in an estate sale or pilfered before one could begin. A man (Diego Cremonesi) looks in the front door as clueless as we are to what’s happening before a jump cut finds him entering a packed restaurant. Impatient by the bar, he gruffly asks a gentleman seated alone (Dario Grandinetti‘s Claudio) if he’s done eating. An argument colored by entitlement and false manners respectively breaks…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Can You Ever Forgive Me? [2018]

2018/09/152020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Do you think they all know? Do you have a Lee Israel work on your shelf? What should be a matter of owning one of her books or not since she was a notable author of biographies who hit the New York Times Best Sellers list, things get much more complicated when you look closer to see she wrote more than just about the likes of Dorothy Kilgallen and Estée Lauder. Israel also wrote as some of her subjects too. During the early 1990s when she was down on her…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Float Like a Butterfly [2018]

2018/09/142020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Keep your head up. A lot can change in five to ten years and even more can unfortunately remain the same. When we first meet the Joyce family little Frances’ age has yet to hit double digits, her younger brother Patrick still clinging to their mom’s side. Their band of traveling Irish sing their folk songs and drink their stout, enjoying the freedom they live to protect—the same freedom outsiders love to destroy by lobbing racist and classist bigotry onto them as though they were savages. Michael Joyce (Dara Devaney)…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Monsters and Men [2018]

2018/09/132020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

Six dudes for one guy. The conversation surrounding Black Lives Matter is (and should be) about the victims of police violence who’ve yet to see any killers in blue face real consequences. It’s not about saying their lives matter more than anyone else, but that they matter at all. Because if you look at the headlines it’s easy to wonder if people think they do—especially the police. Just like nursery rhymes in classrooms have begun teaching youngsters how to stay safe during school shootings, many parents of POC children are…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Mid90s [2018]

2018/09/102020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

I don’t kiss and tell. The summer between middle school and high school is a formative one for any kid. There’s this sense of moving away from childhood and towards young adulthood—of needing to act older to fit in considering the pecking order has restarted with you down at the bottom. Factor in a sibling who’s already gone through this transition (living to remind you of this fact with his penchant for brutal abuse you’re too naïve to realize is his own insecurity seeking an easy target to work out…