Drama | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Pariah [2011]

2018/02/082020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

God doesn’t make mistakes. If you can’t tell how out-of-place Alike (Adepero Oduye) feels when staring slack-jawed at a pole dancer before escaping to a seat by the wall with phone open to check the time, you will when she all but pushes her friend Laura (Pernall Walker) off of the bus home to ensure some alone time between then and her stop. What could have just been a coming of age story about a closeted teenage woman caught between public and private worlds suddenly becomes an authentic portrayal of…

REVIEW: Entanglement [2018]

2018/02/072020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Just let go. We’ve all asked the question: “What does our life mean?” Some of us do so out of curiosity, some out of boredom, and others from a place of desperation. Ben Layten (Thomas Middleditch) falls in the latter category after the wife he loved so deeply for many years leaves him for another man. He literally cannot cope with this turn of events, a long-standing bout with psychological issues and medications exacerbating any hope to find calm. So he does the unthinkable and resorts to suicide—multiple times. You…

REVIEW: The Silent Child [2017]

2018/02/062020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Orange juice. Director Chris Overton and writer Rachel Shenton pull no punches with their short on deaf awareness entitled The Silent Child. What could have been a cloying piece about parents thawing to the realities of a life they pretend they’re too busy to see with eyes open proves a rather bleak depiction of how ablest our society is. It’s one thing to realize how ill-equipped many institutions in the United States and Britain are towards the hearing impaired, but another to bluntly air the delusions of family members who…

REVIEW: Watu Wote [All of Us] [2017]

2018/02/052020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

You’ll have to kill us all. It’s dispiriting to constantly watch as Muslims are forced to defend themselves against the bigotry of Catholics who blindly reject their entire religion as one synonymous with terrorism. Looking back upon history (and the present) to see the horrors committed by Christians under the guise of “acts of God” highlights the hypocrisy and ultimately the racism at its back. They label other human beings evil for doing exactly what they have done for centuries. They champion immigration bans, quote inaccurate statistics, and sit back…

REVIEW: My Nephew Emmett [2017]

2018/01/292020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Take me instead. Everyone knows or should know who Emmett Till was. Many label his death as a major catalyst for what would become the Civil Rights movement—it occurring in August 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott following in December. At only fourteen years of age this Chicago native was accused of whistling and flirting with a married white woman while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. Her husband and his half-brother tracked down where he was staying and abducted him at gunpoint during the night before leaving his lifeless body…

REVIEW: DeKalb Elementary [2017]

2018/01/292020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

We’re all gonna die today. There’s a moment in Reed Van Dyk‘s DeKalb Elementary where the young, mentally unstable white male shooter (Bo Mitchell‘s Steven Hall) exits the school in search of a suicide-by-cop scenario. He opens fire on the police—receiving bullets in return—until the courageously calm black female receptionist (Tarra Riggs‘ Cassandra Rice) asks him to come back in so as not to hurt himself. It’s a surreal exchange because you place yourself in her situation and realize you would probably start silently praying that the cops do grant…

REVIEW: The Strange Thing About the Johnsons [2011]

2018/01/252020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

I’m sorry if this is weird. How do you show someone that what he considers innocent or “normal” is anything but? You flip it. You turn the victim into perpetrator and vice versa so that they can begin to understand the position they so involuntarily place others in as though it’s their right. But even this isn’t enough when the insidious nature of abuse is so intrinsically linked to a warped and archaically outdated cultural bias. This is why you can’t ask a chauvinist how he’d feel being objectified because…

REVIEW: The Commuter [2018]

2018/01/222020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

One little thing. If the timeline is to be believed, the fourth meet-up between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson entitled The Commuter was the result of the latter rather than the former. Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi‘s story went through the hands of at least two other stewards as well as a rewrite by Ryan Engle before finally going in front of the cameras. So one could hypothesize Collet-Serra was brought in as someone familiar with the genre, tropes, and especially the lead actor to bring things home.…

REVIEW: Strawberry Flavored Plastic [2018]

2018/01/212020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

The unscratchable itch. How do you make a serial killer sympathetic? Easy answer: compromise your own morality. This is the reality that Errol Morgan (Nicholas Urda) and Ellis Archer (Andres Montejo) present themselves upon discovering the subject of their documentary isn’t the reformed ex-con guilty of a crime of passion they thought. No, Noel Rose (Aidan Bristow) is a murderer who’s gone unnoticed for decades with who knows how many victims to his name. He’s also charming, intelligent, and psychologically fascinating—traits that sell him as a feasibly effective subject as…

REVIEW: Ava [2017]

2018/01/192020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

They won’t spoil our summer. Knowing your sight will leave you prematurely is a tough pill to swallow. Being told at age thirteen that the process had sped up to the point where all night vision would be gone by summer’s end is nothing short of devastating. Unfortunately this is the news Ava (Noée Abita) must cope with as vacation begins. It’s a sobering reality she confronts with steely resolve as her mother Maud (Laure Calamy) cries on the car ride home. The hope, however, is that these next few…

REVIEW: Phantom Thread [2017]

2018/01/182020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

You found me. I’m not sure there’s a better director working today than Paul Thomas Anderson. I don’t say this as a long-time fan that calls Magnolia his favorite film of all-time. I say it as someone who’s watched his career expand and evolve in orchestration, aesthetic, tone, and performance. There’s an air about his art that demands revisiting for introspective ruminations and profound revelations. It’s almost as though he creates these works for them to be dissected into their hybridized genres, dramatic gravitas, and historical eccentricities. But just as…