Film Reviews | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Bless Their Little Hearts [1984]

2017/07/202017/07/21 Jared Mobarak

“I’m tired, tired, tired. Start trying to be a man.” There’s no getting around the connection that binds Billy Woodberry‘s Bless Their Little Hearts to Charles Burnett‘s Killer of Sheep. Both were written by Burnett, shot in Watts, and entries in the movement known as the “LA Rebellion”. They both deal with the struggle to survive as a family on the poverty line with little wiggle room as far as an escape. But even as they share cast/crew members barely five years apart, the two are also as different from…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Better Watch Out [2017]

2017/07/202017/11/30 Jared Mobarak

“U LEAVE U DIE” It’s Christmas and songs of carolers are in the air of a quaint suburban neighborhood populated by houses big enough to list four bedrooms yet safe enough to not need alarms. Perfectly imperfect families live inside them like the pulls-no-punches Deandra (Virginia Madsen) and affably self-deprecating Robert (Patrick Warburton) showing how love can take and sometimes excel with a little argumentatively sarcastic friction. They may drink and swear, but they’d do anything for twelve-going-on-thirteen year old son Luke (Levi Miller)—and he knows it. A sensitive kid…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: The Honor Farm [2017]

2017/07/192017/07/22 Jared Mobarak

“Make a choice” If Karen Skloss‘ feature narrative debut The Honor Farm possesses anything it’s an abundance of style. This is a gorgeously shot prom night turned mushroom trip romp of millennial excess caught in the throes of dream. We meet Lucy (Olivia Grace Applegate) walking through the woods in her dress—trees covered in toilet paper and forests of white light and ribbons manifesting a border between danger and safety. The evil (assumedly) arrives in the form of a person adorned by a stag’s head (the eyes blink); her salvation…

REVIEW: Killer of Sheep [1978]

2017/07/182017/07/19 Jared Mobarak

“Now that ain’t me … and damn sure won’t be” It’s not everyday that a masters thesis film is declared a national treasure by the Library of Congress and placed on the National Film Registry, but films like Charles Burnett‘s Killer of Sheep don’t come along everyday either. Shot on weekends over a year in the Watts ghetto of Los Angeles, Burnett’s debut feature was made for less than ten thousand dollars, never received a theatrical run until three decades after its 1977 completion date, and remained largely unseen due…

REVIEW: Dunkirk [2017]

2017/07/172017/07/18 Jared Mobarak

“He may never be himself again” War is often depicted as a quantifiable number of those who survived and those who did not. Many films choose this route, picking a battle to show the firefight’s chaos and cost. We remember the Battle of Gettysburg and D-Day as turning points, insane offensives that wrought heavy casualties just as they provided a newfound and tangible hope for victory. It’s glory or despair that’s highlighted depending on whose perspective the story adheres because we want to witness the emotional gray areas of melancholy…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Dead Shack [2017]

2017/07/162017/07/23 Jared Mobarak

“I think when the blood’s black there’s no going back” I like when a director knows what he/she wants from his/her film—even if the goal is to entertain on a level that ensures its legacy falls short of cinematic greatness. Some of my favorite movies are those that demand to be re-watched not for comprehension’s sake or to acknowledge metaphor underneath formal expertise, but because they’re fun. Horror/comedy is ripe for delivering exactly that result with its ability for work to simultaneously excel as an example of the genre’s common…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Replace [2017]

2017/07/162017/07/17 Jared Mobarak

“I thought this was just a painkiller” There’s a captivating science fiction horror concept at the back of director Norbert Keil and co-writer Richard Stanley‘s Replace with the question: how far would you be willing to go for your youth? Do you crave longevity? Vanity? Rebirth? What would you sacrifice for it? Memory? Sanity? Life itself as the past becomes a voluntary casualty of the future? This stuff is ripe for body horror grotesquery, philosophical query, and hubristic intent. And in some respects Keil and Stanley’s film touches upon each…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: 악녀 [Ak-Nyeo] [The Villainess] [2017]

2017/07/142017/07/15 Jared Mobarak

“You came alone?” Writer/director Byung-gil Jung sure knows how to open an action flick. Think Oldboy‘s hallway scene from the first-person perspective of Hardcore Henry spilling over through a non-descript doorway into a wide-open setting for a one-on-twenty bloodbath a la Kill Bill‘s House of Blue Leaves sequence. Only when the orchestrator of this carnage is picked up and shoved headfirst into a mirror does the camera stumble backwards to show Sook-hee’s (Ok-bin Kim) bloodied face and grimace for more. It’s the type of over-the-top, out-of-control set piece most films…

REVIEW: War for the Planet of the Apes [2017]

2017/07/132017/07/14 Jared Mobarak

“We are the beginning and the end” I’ve never seen the original Planet of the Apes films, but the little I know has always presented the titular apes as antagonists. You don’t cast Charlton Heston as your lead circa 1968 unless you want him to be the central figure with which to align. He’s a man trapped on a foreign world ruled by a species his scientists long held as inferior—prototypes for his own advanced existence. How it ends is hardly a spoiler anymore, its subversion of the entire premise…

REVIEW: The Big Sick [2017]

2017/07/122017/07/13 Jared Mobarak

“Always with the comedy” A lot of romantic comedies release each year—a lot. And they’re generally all the same with characters built from stereotypes rather than a writer’s personal experience. The ones that stick out are therefore those that arrive from the heart with something true to say. They’re the few possessing the honesty to show love’s ebbs and flows as well as the reality that it won’t always prevail. Sometimes the journey of the central couple lies in their growth to move onto other things, their brief collision providing…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Savage Dog [2017]

2017/07/112017/07/31 Jared Mobarak

“The human is the hardest animal to kill” When a film opens with Scott Adkins rising from the mud with a scream in Indochina circa 1959, you begin cultivating expectations. You forgive the ham-fisted voiceover narration and the quick slow motion cuts disorienting place and time. You forgive the lack of context as to why this man (and a woman too) was trapped under mud in the first place because you’re re-situating yourself in your seat to brace for the impact of the actor’s fists against the flesh of whomever…