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REVIEW: Weekends [2018]

2019/02/012020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Why wouldn’t a child of divorce remember his youth as a horror film? You have the responsible parent languishing in the midst of an in-progress home as she struggles to remake her life and the unpredictable “cool” parent who gets to shirk his duties and simply provide fun for two days in a bachelor pad decked out with everything no middle-aged man needs. And then come Mom and Dad’s “friends”—the formidable father figure replacement looking to horn in on your monopoly of maternal warmth and the out-of-nowhere mother figure seeking…

REVIEW: One Small Step [2018]

2019/02/012020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

We don’t do anything alone in this world, but sometimes we do have a tendency to forget it until those who’ve helped us have disappeared. This is the message behind Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas‘ One Small Step, the sweetly told journey of a young Chinese American girl dreaming of space from a cardboard box shuttle with her Dad in the backseat. The filmmakers move us forward through the years with that flight of fantasy becoming an adolescent mission. From ear-to-ear smile in moon boots jumping on the bed to…

REVIEW: Late Afternoon [2018]

2019/02/012020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I was never good at keeping time. Good luck keeping a dry eye during Louise Bagnall‘s heartfelt look at an elderly woman suffering from an Alzheimer’s-like disease. Even when the endgame is obvious, you can’t stop the emotions from rising within. I’d argue that knowing what’s coming before it does only makes the result more potent because you can anticipate the act but not the method. And with swirls of color, morphing shapes, and characters spanning time before making way for others, the journey becomes an unpredictable ride through the…

REVIEW: Animal Behaviour [2018]

2019/02/012020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

See? You’re fine. It’s a rather shrewd personification that’s at the back of Alison Snowden and David Fine‘s Animal Behaviour. We accept the impulses of animals—even adore them sometimes—but prove desperate to curb our own. The idea is that they don’t know better and we do. It’s our more evolved brains that allow us to see how harmful our impulses can be and decide to consciously work towards correcting them. Those who can’t and, more importantly, those who refuse are thus deemed “animals” themselves. Murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals…

REVIEW: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse [2018]

2018/12/132020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

It’s just puberty. You have to hand it to Sony for thinking outside the box. Not long ago they had the number one cinematic superhero property with Tobey Maguire donning the Spidey-suit to take on the Osborns. They tried to strike gold twice with a new “Amazing” iteration starring Andrew Garfield, but the results simply couldn’t compete with the creative and financial gains Marvel proper had with their Disney-backed universe. So they buckled. They made the compromise they said they never would and allowed the Spider-Man character to become an…

REVIEW: 未来のミライ [Mirai no Mirai] [Mirai] [2018]

2018/12/012020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

I don’t like everyone! Young Kun (Moka Kamishiraishi) is excited to welcome his mother (Kumiko Asô) home after giving birth to his baby sister. I single out “mother” because she’s whom he misses. Dad (Gen Hoshino) has never really been around due to constantly working so Kun doesn’t necessarily have any affinity for the man. As for the new child: if she can’t pull her weight playing bullet trains with him, what’s the point of her even being there? Kun is barely removed from the toddler age scale himself, though,…

REVIEW: リズと青い鳥 [Rizu to aoi tori] [Liz and the Blue Bird] [2018]

2018/11/282020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

I hope that day never comes. The filmmakers behind リズと青い鳥 [Rizu to aoi tori] [Liz and the Blue Bird] did a smart thing: they took an existing property (Ayano Takeda‘s novel series Sound! Euphonium which has subsequently become a manga, anime series, and film) and expanded upon two of its secondary characters by allowing them to take the lead. I’m not familiar with the original iterations of the property, but a bit of research shows that its plot surrounds a high school concert band in Kyoto, Japan just returned to…

REVIEW: Ralph Breaks the Internet [2018]

2018/11/212020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

You said I was trenching! I knew things weren’t going to go as hoped when the lack of a short film before Ralph Breaks the Internet brought a filmed introduction by three of its middle-aged, male creators instead. They pretend as though they’re personally beaming themselves into our theater to share their gratitude with fake buffering circles freezing frames every now and then as one tells us the hardest part of making this sequel was fitting everything they love about the internet in. It’s spoken with a transparent insecurity boomers…

REVIEW: Tito e os Pássaros [Tito and the Birds] [2018]

2018/10/182020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

You catch fear from ideas. The “outbreak” started years ago when the twenty-four hour news cycle broke onto the scene by stoking fear for ratings out of a necessity for content. We used to only get an hour of local news every night—itself needing to be bolstered by a public interest story or two—with a few national programs enlightening us on world events. Information dispersal became editorializing. Editorializing became for-profit politicization wherein truth was filtered through a partisan prism pre-packaged for Election Day rather than relevancy. News became entertainment, snuff…

REVIEW: Smallfoot [2018]

2018/09/242020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

True your aim. Would it be hyperbolic to call Smallfoot the most dangerous film of the year? Definitely … and yet it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Yes there’s a wholesome message at the back of what Karey Kirkpatrick (who co-directed with Jason Reisig and co-wrote with Clare Sera from a previous script that itself was based on Sergio Pablos‘ book Yeti Tracks) has put onscreen, but it’s not difficult to misconstrue its meaning if you’re motivated to do so. Ask him and he’ll say it’s a story about not lying…

FANTASIA18 REVIEW: ペンギン・ハイウェイ [Pengin Haiwei] [Penguin Highway] [2018]

2018/07/292020/04/03 Jared Mobarak

I might be too amazing for my own good. Adapted from Tomihiko Morimi‘s Nihon Science Fiction Taisho Award-winning novel from 2010, Penguin Highway takes us into a world barely unlike our own. Directed by Hiroyasu Ishida from Makoto Ueda‘s script, the film centers upon a Japanese fourth grader on the cusp of self-proclaimed greatness. With just under four thousand days until adulthood and his first Nobel Prize (he calculated it himself), nothing can peel Aoyama’s (Kana Kita) precocious interest from new, mysterious experimentations besides his crush: the town’s pretty dental…