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REVIEW: 江湖儿女 [Jiang hu er nü] [Ash Is Purest White] [2018]

2019/04/232020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

Armed men tend to die first. The genesis of Zhangke Jia‘s Jiang hu er nü [Ash is Purest White] is intriguing. After thinking about cut scenes from two of his earlier films starring now wife Tao Zhao (Unknown Pleasures and Still Life), he found himself merging her characters into one. He saw this woman having begun in the coal-mining town of Shanxi before eventually making way towards Fengjie as the county worked to flood cities for construction on the Three Gorges Dam. So this latest work becomes a sort of…

REVIEW: Rafiki [2018]

2019/04/142020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

We’re going to be something real. Some will dismiss Wanuri Kahiu‘s Rafiki as derivative simply because they refuse to see what makes it so special. They’ll mention its Romeo and Juliet parallel as far as having the children of opposing political candidates fall in love. They’ll compare it to generic love stories—and generic gay love stories—because that’s what it is at its core. And when the subject of prejudice and violence towards these young lovers arises, they won’t shy from deeming it already treaded territory. What such reductive takes ignore,…

REVIEW: 情牽拉麵茶 [Ramen Teh] [Ramen Shop] [2018]

2019/04/102020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

He kept her memory alive with every bowl of ramen. While Eric Khoo‘s Ramen Teh [Ramen Shop] is at its core a story about a young man looking to reclaim a part of his heritage that was lost, it’s also a rather poignant account of the lasting scars of war and the struggle to separate hate from love when two worlds collide. Because it’s not simply that Masato (Takumi Saitoh) never returned to Singapore after leaving with his parents at age ten. He wasn’t welcome there. Despite the country being…

REVIEW: Le notti del terrore [Burial Ground] [1981]

2019/04/082020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

It’s a walking corpse! The earth trembles and graves open just like Ragno Nero (Black Spider) foretold when talking about a non-descript “they” joining the living as messengers of death. A professor (Raimondo Barbieri) catalyzes this event when an underground discovery releases a horde of zombies onto him and the three couples he had already invited to share his findings. They don’t know where he’s gone upon arriving so they capitalize on his absence with a night of sex to supply director Andrea Bianchi‘s audience with some nudity and half-hearted…

REVIEW: Transit [2018]

2019/03/192020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

I won’t be writing anymore school essays. It took until the end of Christian Petzold‘s Transit and my reading the press notes to realize Georg’s (Franz Rogowski) story unfolded in the present day. I felt off-balance from the start as far as what the historical context for these events were because he was a German man in France fleeing an impending fascist force, hopeful of escaping somewhere outside of its reach. Was he Jewish? It’s never said. Is this the lead-up to World War II? Aesthetics, architecture, and cellphones prove…

REVIEW: Climax [2018]

2019/03/182020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

Anything. What would you do for the chance to work with the illustrious choreographer Selva (Sofia Boutella) and her DJ Daddy (Kiddy Smile)? According to the group of young dancers they interviewed: “Anything.” Some are coy when asking for context to the question with a smile and others are quick to pretty much say they’d kill a person if asked. So off they all go to a remote school during winter to rehearse a routine with which they plan to set New York and London stages ablaze. And with an…

REVIEW: Ruben Brandt, Collector [2018]

2019/03/142020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

Characters from famous paintings continue to attack me. Writer/director Milorad Krstic has combined his love for painting and film into an action thriller as surreal as it is familiar. The whole uses his own unique animation style as a filter with which to recreate masterpieces of both visual mediums—each famed piece simultaneously recognizable as its real life counterpart and integrated into the over-arching aesthetic onscreen. Think Modigliani (with his elongated faces and pasted on noses) by way of Picasso (with a Cubist sensibility fracturing norms to include three eyes or…

REVIEW: Gloria [2013]

2019/03/132020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

Are you always this happy? While sitting next to her ex-husband (Alejandro Goic‘s Gabriel) at their adult son’s birthday party, Gloria (Paulina García) peers at old wedding photos and comments about how naïve they were. He of course tries shifting those sentiments by exclaiming they were in love, but she just smiles and repeats “naïve” once more. If you couldn’t quite put your finger on what type of person Gloria was before this moment, this cementation of present strength and clarity should make it crystal clear afterwards. She now knows…

REVIEW: Ksiaze i dybuk [The Prince and the Dybbuk] [2018]

2019/03/112020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

He never spoke about his past. The title says it all: Ksiaze i dybuk [The Prince and the Dybbuk]. Rather than describe two separate entities, however, Elwira Niewiera and Piotr Rosolowski‘s documentary portrays director Michal Waszynski as both and neither. Their investigations lead them to multiple countries as close friends and basic strangers attempt to piece together who he really was on-set and off. This means interviews with his “second family” in Italy (the Dickmanns), World War II veterans who served in the Polish/Russian unit he documented, an extra from…

REVIEW: Die Unsichtbaren [The Invisibles] [2019]

2019/03/032020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

After a little while you noticed that they were scared. We’re so used to stories of Holocaust survivors talking about what they endured inside the concentration camps that we forget around seven thousand Jewish men and women stayed hidden during World War II. While only about fifteen hundred ultimately walked away to live their lives in the aftermath, it’s impossible not to hail them and those who assisted them as heroes. The tales of close calls and secrets alone are worth discovering and yet these four (Cioma Schönhaus, Ruth Gumpel,…

REVIEW: Werk ohne Autor [Never Look Away] [2018]

2019/02/222020/03/29 Jared Mobarak

Everything that’s true is beautiful. The thing that people who didn’t attend art school or don’t have a foundation in art history never understand is the reasoning behind postmodern art. They find it funny to reductively joke about how their three-year old child could net them a million dollars by scribbling on a canvas because they refuse to look beneath the surface and let the image speak as emotion through abstract form rather than some ingrained sense of realism. These artists had the skill to paint portraits but chose to…