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REVIEW: End Game [2018]

2019/01/232020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I feel better more than I feel bad. Two-time Oscar winner Rob Epstein and directing partner Jeffrey Friedman‘s short End Game bills itself as an intimate document of medical practitioners on the cutting edge of palliative care. Despite my believing the doctors onscreen are exactly that via trust, the film as presented doesn’t do this thesis justice. Rather than focus upon these men and women (the head of the Zen Hospice Project is allowed a brief interview to share his own brush with death) or the new wave treatments they’re…

REVIEW: A Night at the Garden [2017]

2019/01/232020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

You all have heard of me. On February 20, 1939, Fritz Kuhn—a naturalized American citizen of German heritage who would later be deported—held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden under the auspices of “pro-America” sentiments for Gentile-Americans looking to escape the Jewish-led media and Jewish Moscow-directed domination of labor unions. Twenty thousand white men and women attended with arms raised in Adolf Hitler’s salute towards this German American Bund leader against a backdrop of George Washington next to swastikas, stars, and stripes. Children cheered as twenty-plus police officers accosted…

REVIEW: Lifeboat [2018]

2019/01/222020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

The heart is where your real thinking comes. Director Skye Fitzgerald‘s Lifeboat is the latest “human face” documentary to get an Oscar nomination. What might set it apart from others—for better or worse—is that it seeks to highlight the face of the man doing the saving as a beacon of hope more than the victims as byproducts of our collective failure as a species. His name is Jon Castle and he’s without a doubt a true hero. He also died this past year (the film’s rescues occurred in 2016) and…

REVIEW: ’63 Boycott [2018]

2019/01/092020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Because today is Freedom Day. One of Kartemquin Films founders (a Chicago-based production studio of documentary films that’s found itself in the Oscar conversation once again with the feature Minding the Gap and this short) was at the school boycott coined “Freedom Day” in 1963 filming the march as a twenty one year old, three years before joining Jerry Temaner and Stan Karter to build the company. It’s only right then that Gordon Quinn would witness the continuation of those injustices fought against by Black citizens still creating a chokehold…

REVIEW: Komunia [Communion] [2016]

2019/01/022020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

I’m not the air. While learning about what to share with the priest during his first confession, young Nikodem is told that stuffing his face with food is a sin known as gluttony. The autistic boy giggles and jokes that he believes gluttony to be a virtue instead—one to replace love since it being prone to kissing should render it the real sin. This sequence initially feels of a comedic, throwaway sort when compared to the rest of Anna Zamecka‘s harrowing documentary Komunia [Communion] and yet that thought couldn’t be…

REVIEW: Dark Money [2018]

2018/12/122020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

This is now the proving ground for the American experiment. The facts speak for themselves in director Kimberly Reed‘s Dark Money: Montana is our nation’s epicenter for corporate election donations. Her interviewees provide us a rundown of why (the copper mining industry’s interest in favorable policy-making leading them to put a corporate stooge onto the legislature) in order to lay the investigative groundwork for explaining the steps citizens have taken to combat it. What make their argument so powerful, however, aren’t the facts as much as the speakers themselves. These…

REVIEW: Hale County This Morning, This Evening [2018]

2018/12/102020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Whose child is this? Photographer RaMell Ross‘ feature debut Hale County This Morning, This Evening presents itself as an emotively academic endeavor that looks into the lives of two Black men in Alabama, projecting them through their humanity rather than simply race. The latter plays a large role too, but on a contextual level feeding into their environment and the choices they’re given to alter it. But there are no verbal set-ups, questions to unearth, or truths to be told beyond life itself and the glorious highs and lows it…

REVIEW: Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? [2018]

2018/12/102020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

This is a white nightmare story. It’s a provocative title for a murder mystery investigation into documentarian Travis Wilkerson‘s own ancestry: Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? He’s presenting a question before we even sit down and then supplies the answer straight away. The trick, however, is that the question is an abstract and his answer one piece to the puzzle. Rather than concern the central event he’s spent four years researching—the legend of his great grandfather (S.E. Branch) murdering a black customer (Bill Spann) at his store—the title’s…

REVIEW: Shirkers [2018]

2018/12/062020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

I never imagined it would end this way. You’re nineteen and studying abroad in England when the stars and ambitions align to reunite with your best friends in Singapore and make a feature film on summer break. You all give your blood, sweat, tears, and money to the project in order to finish just in time to go back to school with one desire on your minds: delving into the footage the first chance you get. But the man entrusted with your seventy reels doesn’t like writing emails or talking…

REVIEW: Minding the Gap [2018]

2018/12/042020/10/02 Jared Mobarak

We formed a family together. It begins as a film about self-created community, three young men coming together on their skateboards to escape the private turmoil experienced at home. The sport was a cathartic outlet more than some bid to act cool, helping them become close enough friends to share details about their individual demons and discover how similar their pasts proved. Suddenly director Bing Liu—who we see cutting his cinematic chops with skating videos shot in the parks and on the streets of their Rockford, Illinois hometown—saw a chance…

REVIEW: L’empire de la perfection [John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection] [2018]

2018/12/012020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Indeed, it seems he’s playing himself. Titled L’empire de la perfection [In the Realm of Perfection] for French audiences, it’s interesting to see the addition of the name John McEnroe for American release. That’s not to say it doesn’t belong since Julien Faraut‘s documentary is very much about the famed tennis player, but that its use as a clarifier may misrepresent how the film approaches said subject. What we’re actually watching beyond McEnroe and the sport itself as captured in the early 1980s by Gil de Kermadec (France’s first national…

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