Drama | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: I Kill Giants [2018]

2018/03/132020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

We’re stronger than we think. While the main creative force behind I Kill Giants is unquestionably screenwriter Joe Kelly (whose limited comic series of the same name alongside artist J.M. Ken Niimura is the basis for his script), director Anders Walter‘s Oscar-winning short Helium shows he’s hardly a stranger to its subject matter. These two found success through the delicately complex experience had when a child confronts his/her as yet abstract conception of death wherein the infinite expanse of one’s imagination can manifest a path towards understanding. Few people find…

REVIEW: The Party [2017]

2018/03/072020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Another announcement. Good God. I admire what Sally Potter is trying to do with her black comedy The Party as experiment. She’s placed a group of friends with different political, economic, and romantic views into a single room, hanging a secret(s) over their heads with the potential to destroy their individual and communal identities. They’re provided the opportunity to come clean and be true to who they are despite what it might do to those around them, each embracing a desire to let their consistently over-inflated egos decide. Unfortunately that…

REVIEW: La montaña sagrada [The Holy Mountain] [1973]

2018/03/012020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold. To wish an art film took itself more seriously seems counterproductive considering most art films have their head so far up their backside that it would be impossible for them to do so. I love Matthew Barney‘s Cremaster series because it is so excessively pretentious and precious about its grand ideas that really don’t matter when approaching the work as a visual art wherein aesthetic is paramount. The fact that it revels in its museum sterility helps us to approach it…

REVIEW: Mohawk [2018]

2018/02/262020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

In my experience it’s the white man who does the scalping. War is an interesting concept wherein life is both priceless and worthless depending upon which side you call yours. When it’s a matter of taking something that you want but do not possess, those who currently hold it are expendable. And when they fight back to retain it we call them enemies, savages. Here they are defending themselves from an invading force and yet they are in the wrong. It’s a fine line between justice and greed, survival and…

REVIEW: Annihilation [2018]

2018/02/222020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Sometimes it’s beautiful. Reflections have been the subject of many fantasies whether it’s Through the Looking-Glass or Poltergeist III. The notion that a double exists in a different world conjures an unavoidable eeriness and the possibility of usurpation wherein fiction could become truth. It’s easy to therefore see the inherent duality as a good versus evil scenario with conqueror and conquered fighting for the opportunity to exist. But what happens when you make your mirror less smooth? What if the prism through which your image has been duplicated refracts rather…

REVIEW: Hannah [2018]

2018/02/222020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

He’s not coming. To see the titular character (Charlotte Rampling) at the start of Andrea Pallaoro‘s Hannah is to see someone like any other. She rides public transportation to her eccentric acting class, cooks dinner, and enjoys a quiet evening beside her spouse. The film’s start is ostensibly a silent one with only the noises of her journey and the sounds of her teacher permeating the calm serenity of a life lived in routine. We think nothing of it. I personal wondered where things would go. I knew Hannah’s story…

REVIEW: November [2017]

2018/02/182020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

The two of you with your frozen souls. What is the point of having a soul if everyone around you doesn’t? I think that’s the central question asked by Rainer Sarnet‘s November, a bleakly told Estonian fairy tale tragedy adapted from Andrus Kivirähk‘s novel Rehepapp. At its core is romance—the kind based in unrequited love that will never bear fruit. Liina (Rea Lest) is a peasant girl trying to catch Hans’ (Jörgen Liik) eye while his sights are affixed well above his social stature upon the German Baron’s (Dieter Laser)…

REVIEW: La passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] [1928]

2018/02/162020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

His ways are not our ways. The history of Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s masterwork La passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc] is almost too perfectly attuned to the subject matter itself. Here was a renowned director hired to craft a movie about France’s most famous Catholic despite being neither French nor Catholic. Dreyer became a sort of pariah, helpless as the Archbishop of Paris and government officials demanded edits out of his control. His original cut then burned in a studio fire before a second created with…

REVIEW: Like Me [2018]

2018/02/152020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Tell me a story. While it may do a better job at depicting the nihilistic depravity of living through social media at the detriment of “real life” than Ingrid Goes West, Robert Mockler‘s Like Me still fails to capture the psychological prison this artificial life creates beyond its surface chaos. We watch Kiya (Addison Timlin) with a voyeuristic relish much like the viewers of her YouTube page—craving insanity as though it’s all an act because it very well could be exactly that. What we watch online isn’t inherently “real.” There…

BERLINALE18 REVIEW: Les rois mongols [Cross My Heart] [2018]

2018/02/142020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

They’re good guys doing bad things. While you can debate the success of politically motivated events like 1970’s October Crisis in Quebec, Canada, you can’t question their danger removed from the cause. The media reports the carnage whether terrorist bombings or kidnappings and murder. They provide an objective account of what’s happening—in this case the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) wreaking havoc to force secession from the country and become an autonomous nation—and leave it to their viewers to understand the context. Adults can handle this because many already…

BERLINALE18 REVIEW: Cobain [2018]

2018/02/112020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

My little man. There’s a scene in Nanouk Leopold‘s Cobain where the titular fifteen year-old (Bas Keizer) tells his estranged, junkie mother Mia (Naomi Velissariou) that he wants to help. Her response is to ask whether she cares about what he does, the answer tragically understood before his mouth utters the word “No.” To watch her shrug her shoulders and say, “Why should you?” epitomizes love’s power and its strength in circumstances where you couldn’t be blamed for believing it didn’t exist at all. Mia has never been a mother…