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REVIEW: Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain [2018]

2018/10/302020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

The old stuff is just weird stuff you got used to. Documentarian Alex Winter is really solidifying his place within the tech world as a storyteller willing to look at modern systems stymying the old guard and exciting the new before helping to disseminate what they mean for the world at-large. He looked back at how Napster disrupted the music scene in Downloaded (something the movie and television industry faces today to the point where a sequel in the next five to ten years wouldn’t be far-fetched) and took us…

REVIEW: Free Solo [2018]

2018/10/252020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

I realize my body would just explode on impact. Free climbing a mountain wall at any height is insane to me. So watching Alex Honnold gaze upon El Capitan with the simultaneous declarations that it scares the crap out of him and that conquering it without rope would be his ultimate goal makes me shudder. I’m all for hiking mountains like Whiteface in the Adirondacks or Mount Adams in New Hampshire because its fun to strap on a backpack with friends and embark on an adventure. Hand-over-hand gymnastics up sheer…

REVIEW: Tea with the Dames [2018]

2018/10/092020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

It’s alright, you can still swear. Friends for over fifty years, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright, and Maggie Smith join together for Nothing Like a Dame [Tea with the Dames] as they often have. This time, however, comes at the behest of director Roger Michell. And while it’s structured to appear like any other get-together this quartet has enjoyed at Plowright’s estate, there’s no effort to hide the production’s artifice under false pretenses of fly-on-the-wall intent. We see clapboards, listen to Smith good-naturedly call out a photographer off-camera, and…

TIFF18 REVIEW: Hjertelandet [Heartbound] [2018]

2018/09/212020/04/01 Jared Mobarak

I can sell my body if it helps my family. A film ten years in the making, anthropologist Sine Plambech and her director husband Janus Metz‘s open a door with Hjertelandet [Heartbound] onto an intriguing humanist story dealing with the complexities of life, love, and survival that spans almost nine thousand kilometers from Thailand to Denmark. The logline is simple: over 900 Thai women have moved to Jutland in order to marry Danes and carve out a better life than is available back home. The motivations for this decision, however,…

TIFF18 REVIEW: The Truth About Killer Robots [2018]

2018/09/012020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

We will not consider the question of the robot’s guilt. The title to Maxim Pozdorovkin‘s documentary The Truth About Killer Robots is intentionally sensationalized for the same reasons a real newspaper article about the death by machine of a Volkswagen factory worker would be accompanied by a photograph of a terminator. James Cameron put a face to the concern humanity has about artificial intelligence and technology—that some type of uprising will occur once we either wrong our creations or prove the catalyst of our own extinction and thus the “disease”…

REVIEW: Brimstone & Glory [2017]

2018/08/232020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

This one has gunpowder in his blood. The concept of The National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico is insane. For two days the town responsible for 90% of all fireworks in the nation plans an elaborate celebration in honor of their patron saint San Juan de Dios wherein they literally run into fire. First is the Castillos del Fuego: high towers affixed with carousels to light and spin with patterns and artwork as tiny missiles fly through the air. Second is the Spanish running of the bulls-inspired Pamplonada where massive…

VENICE18 REVIEW: Why Are We Creative? [2018]

2018/08/202020/04/02 Jared Mobarak

That’s the only question. The question that Hermann Vaske has asked for over two decades is a large one. Why Are We Creative? There’s no blanket answer—no right or wrong notion of the philosophical ramifications trying to put your own personal interpretation into words conjures. So it’s interesting that he would end his film with a statement explaining how the thousand-plus subjects he asked changed the way he looks at the world. It’s interesting because we don’t know if that is true. After traveling the world to confront geniuses in…

REVIEW: McQueen [2018]

2018/08/142020/04/03 Jared Mobarak

If you want to know me, just look at my work. I can understand the ubiquity of a name like Alexander McQueen because I remember knowing it when he tragically committed suicide back in 2010. Recognition only took one mention despite it being all over the news—even if I wasn’t wholly sure who he was removed from it. The fashion scene has never been something I paid attention to and yet some designers become a part of the pop culture lexicon regardless. That turned out to be true with this…

REVIEW: Three Identical Strangers [2018]

2018/07/122020/04/04 Jared Mobarak

I don’t know if this will turn out great or terrible. Just imagine you’re walking onto your college campus for the first time as a freshman and everyone passing by says hello. Okay. Maybe you’ve landed at a happy-go-lucky school of friendly co-eds ready to welcome all newcomers to the tribe. But then some say, “I thought you weren’t coming back?” Some of the guys start patting you on the back and some of the girls start kissing you without warning. You wouldn’t be blamed for pinching yourself in hopes…

REVIEW: Eating Animals [2018]

2018/07/082020/04/04 Jared Mobarak

No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. Author Jonathan Safran Foer (of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close fame) wrote his third book—a memoir entitled Eating Animals—as an answer to the question he asked himself upon the birth of his newborn son: Should he raise him a vegetarian? It’s a hot-button issue these days with the amount of money food processors and growers earn as “true American entrepreneurs living a ‘small business’ dream” and then put into the government…

REVIEW: Won’t You Be My Neighbor? [2018]

2018/06/222020/04/06 Jared Mobarak

Look for the helpers. I remember watching “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” as a kid, but couldn’t have told you anything about it besides the fact that Fred Rogers would trade his jacket for a cardigan and eventually let us travel to his Neighborhood of Make-Believe. To me it was the aesthetic that grabbed hold—the trolley trip to a world of puppets and fantasy that brought to life the little maquettes on his shelf. So I always thought the entire endeavor was a bit of a spectacle, an educational show that knew…