Drama | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: A Crooked Somebody [2018]

2017/11/152020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

People aren’t just done being psychic. There’s a line that our actions can cross when our desire to help others turns into helping ourselves. And it’s often difficult to see when you’re the one falling prey to this hubristic vanity masked as good will. Outsiders don’t have a problem recognizing the shift, though. They only see a charlatan and victim too distraught with pain to discern truth from what they want to hear. This is why there will always be a con artist, mark, and disgruntled bystander catching the trick…

REVIEW: Destined [2017]

2017/11/152020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

Either way you started a war. A young boy residing in the Brewster projects of Detroit follows his friend to a stash house unaware that the consequences of this moment will shape the rest of his life. He’s coerced into dealing as a means for survival—the only way to convince his friend’s bosses that he isn’t a snitch being to actually engage in the activities he would be snitching on. So he ignores another friend just trying to say hello, his fear towards talking to her while “working” too much…

REVIEW: Die göttliche Ordnung [The Divine Order] [2017]

2017/11/122020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

But here at home time stood still. The opening transition from credits to film of Petra Biondina Volpe‘s Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award-winning Die göttliche Ordnung [The Divine Order] is absolute perfection. With Jo Jo Benson and Peggy Scott-Adams’ “Soulshake” playing atop images from America spanning women’s liberation, civil rights, Woodstock, and more, we begin to see the impact of political revolutions changing the very fabric of first world societies. And then with a record scratch we’re transported to a rural village in Switzerland at the exact same time: the…

REVIEW: Goodbye Christopher Robin [2017]

2017/11/072020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

I’ve had enough of making people laugh. I want to make them see. It begins with a letter—the kind that rips heart from chest. World War II is in full swing and the Milnes (Domhnall Gleeson‘s Alan and Margot Robbie‘s Daphne) are biding their time awaiting word from their son Christopher (Alex Lawther). They know what news arrives as soon as they see the mailwoman riding up their driveway, though. They know their son is gone. War claimed another innocent soul, an inevitability Alan experienced first-hand fighting the fight prematurely…

REVIEW: Princess Cyd [2017]

2017/11/062020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

You get to see where your mom came from. Tragedies are never isolated incidents with a single victim, perpetrator, and survivor left to remember (or forget) what happened. Oftentimes those roles expand to encompass multiple parties or even overlap in ways that let blame, hate, and forgiveness coexist. This scenario is only rendered truer when it comes to a family ordeal, when those now gone leave a permanent void never to be filled again. And while we cope for a time—telling ourselves we’ve gotten over what happened to the point…

REVIEW: Murder on the Orient Express [1974]

2017/11/042020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

With the help of a hat box. If the way in which Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) manipulates his suspects into perfectly incriminating themselves upon inquisition—often unbeknownst to us until the final reveal—infers that he has a photographic memory, we the audience need a bit more exposition as it concerns yet unseen connections than perhaps the film would like to share. This is why director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paul Dehn provide an opening montage of newspaper clippings and shadowy reenactments of young Daisy Armstrong’s kidnapping and subsequent murder. Because it…

REVIEW: Das merkwürdige Kätzchen [The Strange Little Cat] [2014]

2017/11/012020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

And onions are my cats. We’ve all felt paralyzed at one time or another, fearing existence and responsibility as opposed to external forces and death. Life becomes our burden, the rote machinations to remain an upstanding member of society and the myriad social imperatives endured to be seen as a person worth ignoring—someone who neither demands attention from being abnormal or overly exceptional. To simply be can prove exhausting because the act of stasis comes with more minutiae than you may think is necessary. Our minds race to decide whether…

REVIEW: My Friend Dahmer [2017]

2017/10/292020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

Smiles up. When someone kills seventeen people over a thirteen-year span with words like necrophilia and cannibalism circling each murder, sympathy for the predator—not his prey—is neither the first nor hundred and first emotion that should come to anyone’s mind. I’m not certain there could be room for anything but disgust whether you’re a stranger, a family member, or an old friend reading the news. And yet we try to find motivation nonetheless. We wonder about how someone could become such a monster right under our nose without ever suspecting…

REVIEW: Suck It Up [2017]

2017/10/262020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

… And she fell down. Grief is a strange, personal, and often entirely unexpected response to tragedy. It will differ depending on who you are, the point in life you’re at, the cause, and myriad details spanning scenario, age, love, hate, or surprise. To cope with a grandparent’s death for example is something we all know is coming. We prepare ourselves for the inevitability and therefore find ourselves able to push through the pain with little to no trouble—depending on your relationship, of course. Conversely, the passing of someone still…

REVIEW: The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017]

2017/10/262020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

You’re too young to worry. Writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos is an artist who deals with consequences through elaborately skewed and often-uncomfortable scenarios just left of the off-putting spot that’s just left of center. He uses absurdity and humor to provoke us in order for his complex existential and social messages to hit home in a way strict realism never could. His films are thus morality plays of sorts pitting characters against one another in a puzzle that may or may not be of their own choosing. They are presented with a…

REVIEW: Beloved [1998]

2017/10/242020/04/22 Jared Mobarak

Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all. Love creates and destroys. Mix in post-traumatic stress disorder and you’ll never know which until it’s too late. Evil can permeate your soul and color your psychology in ways that merge right and wrong into a singular goal seeking survival. To endure horror is to alter everything you were, your innocence lost no matter how hard you try to reclaim it. The thought of experiencing the nightmare again—or having it find you within a place you believed safe—is enough…