Film Reviews | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Birthday [2015]

2015/07/042015/07/04 Jared Mobarak

“Some assembly required” It’s not difficult to know what’s coming as soon as a Marine (Chris Gouchoe) and his wife (Mandy Moody) are seen discovering the discrepancy in their math counting down the days until his return home. She has it marked on her calendar as forty-two to go while he gently explains it’s actually forty-three. A lot can happen in twenty-four hours, though, so we of course must assume the worst. Depending on your mettle and strength, death can almost prove an easier result than the future many veterans…

REVIEW: Gimme Shelter [1970]

2015/07/022015/07/03 Jared Mobarak

“Like lemmings to the sea” And to think they only wanted to follow The Rolling Stones around America on tour. I wonder what Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin hoped to find in the edit via their “reactive” filmmaking philosophy because it surely wasn’t what resulted. Who could have known how dangerous things would turn at a free concert meant to cap a successful tour? What was rousing performances, candid behind-the-scenes moments, and the hectic craziness of organizing a massive show on the fly ultimately became a document of…

REVIEW: Terminator Genisys [2015]

2015/06/292015/07/01 Jared Mobarak

“If there was another way I would have taken it” Much of the success attributed to “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” stems from it using its time travel-centric mythology to erase the franchise’s failures—mainly Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. You’d think Terminator Salvation would have followed suit, but for whatever reason it held onto that sub-par entry if only through the character of Kate Brewster, otherwise known as Mr. Savior of Humanity John Connor’s wife. The real issue, however, was that it also retained a desire for big theatrics…

REVIEW: Eden [2014]

2015/06/272015/06/29 Jared Mobarak

“Save France with Coke” The rock and roll life has always been filled with temptation no matter what decade. So electronica, house, and garage music’s heyday (has it ended?) of the 90s proves no exception. With its world of DJs and samplers standing at turntables while their audience danced and raved below, however, learning a little bit of the behind the scenes drama couldn’t hurt from building upon its mystique. Unsurprisingly its luminaries possessed the usual copious amount of drugs, sex, and money woes like in every other genre. What…

REVIEW: Stray Dog [2015]

2015/06/272018/07/16 Jared Mobarak

“It’s veterans helping veterans. Who else do we got?” Five years after writer/director Debra Granik‘s sophomore effort Winter’s Bone earned four Oscars nominations including Best Picture, she returns to the big screen with a documentary spawned from her experience filming in Missouri. Far from a novice to the genre-she lensed a documentary called Thunder in Guyana before making her feature length debut Down to the Bone-it may still seem strange she’d follow an acclaimed work of fiction with an uncensored look at an old Vietnam War vet. But as she’d…

REVIEW: Трудно быть богом [Hard to Be a God] [2014]

2015/06/252015/06/26 Jared Mobarak

“Don’t drink. I only sniff now.” There’s a plot inside Aleksey German‘s final film Трудно быть богом [Hard to Be a God]—an audacious sci-fi epic slinging mud and feces in our faces while everyone onscreen sniffs them like drugs until we’re involuntarily following suit. No really, there is. Well, maybe a lingering vestige of what Arkadiy and Boris Strugatskiy‘s original novel contained that the 74-year old auteur (who’d wanted to adapt it since the 60s before finally completing it after a decade-long production process ultimately ending in his death from…

REVIEW: Ted 2 [2015]

2015/06/24 Jared Mobarak

“Fresh cakes” Something Steve Harvey said on a recent episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” really struck me: “Tragedy strikes. I got news for you—we have the jokes that night. We know that we can’t bring this to the public yet cause we’ll get hammered. But in a room alone, when it’s just us, we have the jokes already ready.” He’s right. If the joke is funny—no matter what the circumstance is—it’s funny. Your finding it offense or “too-soon” isn’t a comment on the joke itself, but on your…

REVIEW: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003]

2015/06/212015/06/22 Jared Mobarak

“Anger is more useful than despair” There’s one great moment in Jonathan Mostow‘s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: its end. I’m not being snarky in some jokey “because it was finally over” kind of way either. It is legitimately good. Half twist, half bittersweet salvation in the face of apocalyptic nightmare where a hero is finally born. The series has been working towards this revelation for two decades by this point; reaching the moment when the future we’ve seen of a world covered in skulls and metal is about…

REVIEW: Unexpected [2015]

2015/06/202015/07/20 Jared Mobarak

“I don’t know what’s going on with the bananas at Trader Joe’s right now” Yes Kris Swanberg‘s Unexpected revolves around two surprise pregnancies and the mothers-to-be reacting to brand new futures set before them. However, it doesn’t use that premise to build a tower of clichés for us to watch topple to the ground in tragedy or remain erect via zany shenanigans like so many other films utilizing pregnancy as a plot device before it. Instead Swanberg and cowriter Megan Mercier take pains to deliver this unpredictable, anxious, and highly…

REVIEW: পথের পাঁচালী [Pather Panchali] [Song of the Little Road] [1955]

2015/06/182015/10/23 Jared Mobarak

“Go ask him for money” The story behind Satyajit Ray‘s debut film পথের পাঁচালী [Pather Panchali] [Song of the Little Road] is one you cannot separate from the work itself. It’s an underdog tale full of hardship and financial woe—incidents that dragged production along for three years before finally bringing India to the world in its neorealism style (after all, Ray helped scout Calcutta locations for Jean Renoir‘s The River and loved Vittorio De Sica‘s Bicycle Thieves). Money plays a huge part in both stories, especially the film’s plot based…

REVIEW: La French [The Connection] [2014]

2015/06/162015/06/17 Jared Mobarak

“The true force of an untouchable is the silence he imposes on others” While everything out there talking about Cédric Jimenez’s La French [The Connection] takes special care to mention William Friedkin‘s classic The French Connection, the comparisons end at that titular focal point. I’m not talking about quality, though, as this unofficial companion is a very good piece of cinema. It’s just not an action thriller like the American rendition made in the thick of heroin’s 1970s heyday. Instead Jimenez and co-writer Audrey Diwan have crafted a straight mob…