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REVIEW: Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo [2020]

2020/08/062020/08/06 Jared Mobarak

My number was B948. I’ve always been fascinated by Danny Trejo‘s story because the first thing you discover after seeing him in a movie is that he’s a reformed criminal who served hard time for armed robbery. He went from a stint in San Quentin and pretty much every other prison in the greater Los Angeles region to giggling alongside children on the set of Robert Rodriguez‘s family-friendly adventure Spy Kids. How is that possible? In this America? As a formidable Chicano? You ask anyone and they’ll say it isn’t.…

REVIEW: The Fight [2020]

2020/07/252020/07/28 Jared Mobarak

If I’m not a civil rights lawyer at this moment in time … then when? Anyone who cares about injustices committed by the Trump administration towards immigrants, women, the LGBTQ community, and other at-risk groups guaranteed civil liberties under the Constitution already knows about the court battles waged during the course of Eli B. Despres, Josh Kriegman, and Elyse Steinberg‘s documentary The Fight. Anyone who doesn’t believe injustices have been committed—or worse, believe the White House’s actions were a response to injustices committed upon “true white Americans”—isn’t going to spend…

REVIEW: Rebuilding Paradise [2020]

2020/07/182020/07/27 Jared Mobarak

Time to abandon ship. As someone residing as far from wildfire country California as possible here in snowy Buffalo, Butte County’s town of Paradise brought two things to mind: the utter devastation suffered on November 8, 2018 and Donald Trump’s callous chuckle upon discovering he couldn’t even muster the empathy necessary to correctly identify the home of the survivors he was meant to console. Director Ron Howard talks about this phenomenon during his post-screening Q&A, describing it as one of the main reasons he sent a film crew as soon…

HOTDOCS20 REVIEW: Two Gods [2020]

2020/05/252020/05/28 Jared Mobarak

That’s when I realized it was time for a change. Some are lucky enough to escape their circumstances. Others learn from those circumstances and discover ways to transform them and themselves in order to move forward and leave them behind. And then there are those whose circumstances defeat them whether or not they actively participate in that self-destruction or not. These are the three choices one has when confronted with the struggles of poverty, systemic racism, violence, and the psychological duress experienced as a result. Hanif Muhammad knows it all…

REVIEW: Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl [2020]

2020/05/202020/05/20 Jared Mobarak

There’s nothing silly about being a teenage girl. While Amy Goldstein‘s documentary Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl obviously centers upon its British rockstar subject’s unorthodox trajectory from Myspace sensation to “GLOW” actress, it also serves as an invaluably informative account of what it means to be a twenty-first century musician thanks to the industry’s ever-changing landscape. The simple fact that Kate Nash‘s career began because she had enough social media followers to turn record label heads is a product of that moment of time, but so too is her courage…

REVIEW: The Painter and the Thief [2020]

2020/05/192020/05/21 Jared Mobarak

Because they were beautiful. Human connections are almost always random. Even in school when meeting new friends for the first time, the reasons that sparked our gravitation towards one another aren’t always clearly defined. Maybe one union was the result of common interests, but perhaps another was born from an indescribable feeling. Sometimes our best friends or romantic partners end up being the people we used to intentionally avoid. It therefore only takes a moment removed from our inherent preconceptions, prejudices, and jealousies to open up a world we would…

HOTDOCS20 REVIEW: Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles [2020]

2020/05/112020/05/14 Jared Mobarak

Why am I getting an email from the Met? The choice of “medium” was easy for renowned chef Yotam Ottolenghi when asked by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to collaborate on their upcoming 2018 exhibition entitled Visitors to Versailles (1682-1789). Whether or not Marie Antoinette actually said the infamous line with which she’ll forever be entangled, the excessive decadence and bloody decline of the Château de Versailles as royal court cannot escape its confectionary marriage with cake. So Ottolenghi set his sights on selecting five of the most innovative and…

REVIEW: Rewind [2020]

2020/05/032020/05/06 Jared Mobarak

I have to put that puzzle back together. When films like Rewind are presented as exercises to reconstruct circumstances surrounding the sexual abuse its filmmaker endured, you can assume the journey will deal with unearthing previously unknown details about what happened through repressed memories. Despite the liberal use of home videos taken by director and subject Sasha Joseph Neulinger‘s father to relive this harrowing past, however, his motivations are very different. Sasha actually remembers everything that occurred: the pain, sorrow, and suicidal thoughts. He can look at himself on-screen and…

REVIEW: Spaceship Earth [2020]

2020/05/022020/05/06 Jared Mobarak

Small groups are engines of change. I was born in 1982 to parents who regularly watched the news during dinner, so learning about Matt Wolf‘s documentary Spaceship Earth was rather shocking considering I had absolutely no recollection of the 1991 Biosphere 2 project. None. At. All. The title conjured thoughts of Epcot Center rather than this two-year experiment covered by every major network during its optimistic genesis and unfortunate demise. It therefore felt weird to watch this account of the experience since anticipating where things were headed proved impossible. Whether…

HOTDOCS20 REVIEW: Finding Sally [2020]

2020/04/262020/04/28 Jared Mobarak

The promise and the agony. It wasn’t until her early thirties that Tamara Mariam Dawit first discovered her father had a fifth sister named Selamawit. When she broached the subject with the other four (as well as her grandmother Tsehai), no one wanted to talk. This was the reason she moved to Ethiopia from Canada, though: to learn about her African heritage. And Aunt Sally wasn’t simply a throwaway piece of that considering the circumstances surrounding both her absence from the family and her eventual disappearance underground as part of…

REVIEW: Pahokee [2020]

2020/04/232020/04/24 Jared Mobarak

I’m not going to the fields. This stat says a lot about Pahokee, FL’s community: 91% of kids at the local high school qualify for free lunch and yet over 90% of every senior class graduates with many heading to college as their family’s first ever collegiate student (if they aren’t also adding to a list of forty current/former NFL players who called this Everglades town home). That’s the goal every parent working the sugar cane fields perpetually burning in the background has for his/her children. They seek to provide…