Film Features | www.jaredmobarak.com

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Replace [2017]

2017/07/162017/07/17 Jared Mobarak

“I thought this was just a painkiller” There’s a captivating science fiction horror concept at the back of director Norbert Keil and co-writer Richard Stanley‘s Replace with the question: how far would you be willing to go for your youth? Do you crave longevity? Vanity? Rebirth? What would you sacrifice for it? Memory? Sanity? Life itself as the past becomes a voluntary casualty of the future? This stuff is ripe for body horror grotesquery, philosophical query, and hubristic intent. And in some respects Keil and Stanley’s film touches upon each…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: 악녀 [Ak-Nyeo] [The Villainess] [2017]

2017/07/142017/07/15 Jared Mobarak

“You came alone?” Writer/director Byung-gil Jung sure knows how to open an action flick. Think Oldboy‘s hallway scene from the first-person perspective of Hardcore Henry spilling over through a non-descript doorway into a wide-open setting for a one-on-twenty bloodbath a la Kill Bill‘s House of Blue Leaves sequence. Only when the orchestrator of this carnage is picked up and shoved headfirst into a mirror does the camera stumble backwards to show Sook-hee’s (Ok-bin Kim) bloodied face and grimace for more. It’s the type of over-the-top, out-of-control set piece most films…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Savage Dog [2017]

2017/07/112017/07/31 Jared Mobarak

“The human is the hardest animal to kill” When a film opens with Scott Adkins rising from the mud with a scream in Indochina circa 1959, you begin cultivating expectations. You forgive the ham-fisted voiceover narration and the quick slow motion cuts disorienting place and time. You forgive the lack of context as to why this man (and a woman too) was trapped under mud in the first place because you’re re-situating yourself in your seat to brace for the impact of the actor’s fists against the flesh of whomever…

INTERVIEW: Matt Tyrnauer, director of Citizen Jane: Battle for the City

2017/05/122020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

Debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, Matt Tyrnauer‘s Citizen Jane: Battle for the City has received rave reviews across the country as it opened in limited release April 21st, 2017. Centering on Jane Jacobs—a journalist, author, and activist—the film showcases the problems inherent to how urban planners in the mid-twentieth century worked. One of the key proponents of this movement to teardown what he deemed “slums” for new, mammoth housing projects of concrete erasing the very communities they sought to “save” was New York’s Robert Moses. His…

INTERVIEW: Aaron Moorhead, director/cinematographer & Justin Benson director/writer of The Endless

2017/04/272020/03/21 Jared Mobarak

As someone who loved Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson‘s Spring to the point of seeking out everything else they had done before that point, hearing about a new work debuting at Tribeca got me excited to see what they would deliver. My assumption was that it was the Aleister Crowley picture they spoke about when I interviewed them last year—I was wrong. While that discovery wasn’t surprising considering how long projects gestate, it was shocking to discover The Endless proved to be a sequel to their first feature collaboration Resolution.…

TFF17 REVIEW: Tilt [2018]

2017/04/212018/04/15 Jared Mobarak

“Can we get away with anything we want?” If only we could go back to the days when mid-life crises happened at fifty-years old and at best meant buying an expensive car (at worst asking for divorce to marry younger). Now this existential breakdown occurs much earlier—let’s say thirty-years old. This is what happens when millennials are born of an era with more time to think about their futures. Rather than needing to buckle down and secure a career straight out of college, your drive for the “best fit” leads…

TFF17 REVIEW: The Endless [2018]

2017/04/202018/04/15 Jared Mobarak

“Please, be quiet” To resolve is to settle, finding the determination to do something rather than simply wait for something to happen to you. A resolution isn’t therefore a firm ending. On the contrary, it serves to provide beginnings. That decision has the potential to set you onto a path towards freedom either from the danger of outside forces or the complacency rendering you immobile within. So to look upon the conclusion of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson‘s debut feature (as a tandem) isn’t to relinquish hope. The being—their riff…

BERLINALE17 REVIEW: Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau [Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves] [2017]

2017/02/122017/02/13 Jared Mobarak

“People do not yet see they are miserable. We will show them!” There’s universality to Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie‘s Ceux qui font les révolutions à moitié n’ont fait que se creuser un tombeau [Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves] even if it is very much a Québécois film. Marking their second collaboration together (after 2011’s Laurentie), the two were desperate to tell a tale about young radicals on the cusp of disillusionment after the failed Maple Spring protests (an infamous series of student demonstrations and…

SUNDANCE17 REVIEW: Machines [2017]

2017/02/012017/02/10 Jared Mobarak

“Poverty is harassment, Sir” The most pointed question asked by Rahul Jain‘s documentary Machines comes from the camera. By showing us the gigantic textile spools, looms, and washers with only their rhythmic clanks, booms, and bangs opposite the Indian workers applying dyes, mixing chemicals, and ensuring there are no jams to the same sounds, we must wonder which are the “machines” of the title. This is an assembly line of ancient metal units kept moving by a revolving door of migrant workers that start at the age of ten to…

SUNDANCE17 REVIEW: Winnie [2017]

2017/02/012017/02/10 Jared Mobarak

“The self no longer mattered. The country came first.” It’s difficult to truly capture a controversial subject in film. For a figure such as Winnie Madikizela Mandela, it may be impossible unless you ensure her perspective is included. This is a woman labeled terrorist by many countries, a wife who “tarnished” her heroic husband’s legacy. Yet the people of South Africa hail her as Nelson Mandela’s equal—maybe greater. She was the on-the-ground leader of the African National Congress (ANC) when he and others were imprisoned or exiled, the one person…

SUNDANCE17 REVIEW: Axolotl Overkill [2017]

2017/01/182017/03/10 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…