Drama | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Vox Lux [2018]

2018/12/082020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Simply put: it was a hit. America lost its innocence on 9/11. It wasn’t an overnight thing, though. The gradual degradation of humanity on an ever-shrinking global landscape stewarded us there as school shootings and terrorist attacks grew with their weak links towards violent videogames rather than an otherwise Puritan sense of sex being worse than murder. Our repressed selves fought against growing malaise until that day provided a scapegoat to blame. We turned our internal rage onto an undeserving people suddenly reduced to their worst and smallest faction so…

REVIEW: The Favourite [2018]

2018/12/072020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

We’ve been laying very different games. This isn’t your parents’ period piece. If the name Yorgos Lanthimos under the header of director didn’t already give you that impression, there it is. The Favourite has everything you’d expect from one, though: real-life characters, powdered faces and wigs, wars discussed from perches miles away from the battlefield, and political jockeying for power. The difference is what Deborah Davis discovered in a corner of British royal history, namely the love and affection shared between Queen Anne, Lady Sarah Churchill (yes, a descendant of…

REVIEW: Boy Erased [2018]

2018/12/052020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Almighty Dog. I’ll never understand religion’s ability to shield believers from its inherent contradictions. I’ve seen faith help many in my family through its power for hope, healing, and positivity. But never have they been tested as far as making the choice to reject Catholicism’s rigidity where it pertains to subjects they’re simply happy to excuse with empty parroting from afar. They try and play both sides of issues—sticking to what they believe without “finding the need to prevent someone else from thinking the opposite.” They’re allowed to do this…

REVIEW: At Eternity’s Gate [2018]

2018/12/032020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

I am my paintings. Vincent Van Gogh is quite the enigmatic figure in the art world as a man whose genius was ahead of its time. His greatest works were painted in the final two years of his life while combatting multiple psychotic breaks and asylum stays. People called his art ugly and dismissed his style as crude, but now he’s revered as a Post-Impressionist who helped expand the possibilities of modern painting in the decades since. He infamously cut off his ear, wrote long letters, and ultimately committed suicide…

REVIEW: Zimna wojna [Cold War] [2018]

2018/12/022020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Time doesn’t matter when you are in love. It’s critical to know that writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski loosely based his main characters in Zimna wojna [Cold War] on their namesakes: his parents. To know he acknowledges the fact that they were destructive together and lovesick apart makes the way in which the fictional Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) and Zula (Joanna Kulig) interact easier to accept since they aren’t necessarily “good” people. They’re selfish, headstrong, and opportunistic. They constantly take via a consciously knowing means of manipulation and grow frustrated when things don’t…

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: The House That Jack Built [2018]

2018/11/282020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

The choice is entirely yours. I can’t wait to discover what’s next for Lars von Trier‘s oeuvre. He followed his Dogme 95 phase with a period steeped in depression and now that one has seemingly just ended with [the blatantly autobiographical] film The House That Jack Built. At its center is the personification of this latter phase’s creative genius—a projection of his aesthetically gorgeous vignettes of brutally depraved imagery. This serial killer (Matt Dillon‘s Jack) sees his trophies as art, his victims the material with which he’s created them from…

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: The Mercy [2018]

2018/11/272020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

What if I tell them I’m here? I had never heard of Donald Crowhurst before seeing James Marsh‘s film The Mercy. This is unsurprising since the British Sunday Times‘ Golden Globe Race of which he was a competitor occurred in 1968, not quite fifteen years before my birth. And if his would-be return-date to Teignmouth, England of July 1969 after yachting around the world without stop or assistance was ingrained in my mind for any event—auspicious or infamous—it was the moon landing. So when the synopsis described this amateur sailor…

REVIEW: Green Book [2018]

2018/11/232020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

Does Betty like butter … er? First things first: racism isn’t funny. It’s surprising that something so important can be forgotten so often, but here we are with another cinematic example of the opposite. What’s worse is that the story director/co-writer Peter Farrelly is bringing to the big screen with intentional beats rendering a wisecracking Italian-American as hilariously racist had the potential of actually saying something. And while it would be easy to blame his name—one synonymous with Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and the grossly tone-deaf Shallow…

REVIEW: Widows [2018]

2018/11/222020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

This isn’t your world. When the first trailer for Widows dropped, I thought, “Steve McQueen is branching out to genre fare now.” This wasn’t a slight, just an observation. I obviously wanted to see it, but thought I could wait before the notes out of TIFF declared it a must-see. Suddenly I needed to reevaluate my perception of what this thing was behind its marketing push. Would there be more than just revenge and heist-based thrills? Would this be a slower burn a la co-writer Gillian Flynn‘s novels augmented by…

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