Romance | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Columbus [2017]

2017/09/132017/09/13 Jared Mobarak

“You grow up around something and it feels like nothing” I’m not sure there’s a better art form than architecture to really let first-time writer/director Kogonada feel at home behind the camera. The man who made his name with video “supercuts” showing aesthetic through-lines of auteurs like Terrence Malick, Wes Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, and Yasujirô Ozu has ostensibly made a feature length one with the structures of Columbus, Indiana serving as his subject. He focuses on the straight lines prevalent throughout the city, each composition meticulously blocked for a captivatingly…

TIFF17 REVIEW: Allure [A Worthy Companion] [2017]

2017/09/102018/03/23 Jared Mobarak

“You don’t deserve any of it” Capturing the complexity of abuse is tough to accomplish when mainstream audiences clamor for black and white delineations between predator and prey. Some go the horror route for metaphorical terror focusing on the pursuer while others go dramatic for the helplessness of a victim unable to break free. Writer/directors (and photographers) Carlos Sanchez and Jason Sanchez chose to throw out convention, using their feature debut as a vehicle to explain how easy boxes don’t exist for the devastation wrought by abusive relationships built on…

TIFF17 REVIEW: On Chesil Beach [2018]

2017/09/082017/10/06 Jared Mobarak

“I wasn’t my family. I was me.” It’s 1962. Florence Ponting (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle) have just been married. She’s from a wealthy family and he a provincial one; her desire to be active in world affairs beyond her status’ ambivalence and his hope to be accepted as an intellectual with the potential of outgrowing a brawler reputation placing them at odds with the environments that raised them to seek escape. And they are in love: a true, deep, and unstoppable love that allowed their differences to…

TIFF17 REVIEW: Porcupine Lake [2017]

2017/08/202017/09/13 Jared Mobarak

“Never ever squeal. That’s a rule.” Teenage Bea (Charlotte Salisbury) is in desperate need of an escape from her mundane, isolated life. We can assume Toronto’s big city living isn’t yet something she’s embraced due to her tendency for fainting spells whenever anxiety grows. Mom (Delphine Roussel‘s Ally) therefore keeps a tight leash, protecting her daughter as best she can while unfortunately assuring the isolation permeates her very soul. Dad (Christopher Bolton) hopes a change of scenery will do both some good, the Northern Ontario diner he inherited a few…

FANTASIA17 REVIEW: Sequence Break [2017]

2017/08/012017/08/03 Jared Mobarak

“Let the void look into you” Introversion and high anxiety are real and can be triggered by the tiniest of things or the lack thereof. Oz (Chase Williamson) has struggled with both his entire life, that insecurity in social situations driving him towards the world of videogames. The joy of solitude playing them and being good at them brought him into a society of like-minded individuals and ultimately a career as mechanic to dinosaurs of derelict arcades past. Was he happy? Sure. Things could always be better, but isn’t that…

REVIEW: A Ghost Story [2017]

2017/07/312017/07/31 Jared Mobarak

“I don’t remember” **SPOILERS** There’s a character (Will Oldham‘s ‘Prognosticator’) in David Lowery‘s A Ghost Story—a sparse meditation on life, love, grief, and death—who delivers a dissertation of that very film. Or at least what pedantically pretentious windbags such as he would think the film means in order to minimize art’s infinite power to profoundly and timelessly touch our souls. He goes on and on about how nothing we do matters. It’s a nihilist rant propping up the beauty of the abstract when working towards the divine only to tear…

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…

REVIEW: לעבור את הקיר [Laavor et hakir] [The Wedding Plan] [2016]

2017/06/02 Jared Mobarak

“It’s a small task for God to find me a groom by the end of Hanukkah” Michal (Noa Koler) doesn’t want to get married. What she truly wants is to no longer be alone. She’s sick of being the person invited to get-togethers rather than the one doing the inviting so she enlists any matchmaker she can find in Jerusalem to help her wish come true. And it works. She finds a man who proposes (Erez Drigues‘ Gidi) and they begin their journey towards a beautiful wedding at the banquet…

REVIEW: Everything, Everything [2017]

2017/05/152017/05/18 Jared Mobarak

“When I talk to him it feels like I’m outside” I was with Nicola Yoon‘s Everything, Everything for its first three-quarters. While it’s just as implausibly overwrought as The Space Between Us—another YA love story mired by a high-concept contrivance that literally places a character’s life in jeopardy so he/she may experience what living free and outdoors feels like—its smaller scale concept allows its romance to shine brighter than its premise’s consequences. The notion that Maddy Whittier (Amandla Stenberg) could die from her rare case of Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)…

REVIEW: Yella [2007]

2017/05/102017/05/11 Jared Mobarak

“I want you to love me again” There’s a glimmer of hope in Yella Fichte’s (Nina Hoss) eye when things finally seem to be going in the right direction. She’s earned a new job starting the day after tomorrow, one that should fill her empty bank account and lead her towards prosperity. But before she can enjoy the good news, she must first endure that which she yearns to escape. This comes in the form of Ben (Hinnerk Schönemann), a man putting a chill down her spine with an unpredictable…

REVIEW: Secretary [2002]

2017/04/222017/04/23 Jared Mobarak

“I like dull work” I had read that Secretary the film was very different from its source material (a short story in Mary Gaitskill’s book Bad Behavior). Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the difference being tone rather than content. Besides a drastically altered ending, everything that happens in text is included almost verbatim. But director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (both credited with “adaptation by” since the result is drastic) deliver it with an absurdist air instead of dramatic severity. Theirs exists in a parallel dimension of…