Romance | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Marriage Story [2019]

2019/12/072020/10/02 Jared Mobarak

The pie was just a pie. It’s crazy how love changes the way we see things. Ambition can look like genius when we’re there as a supportive cheerleader and narcissism when we begin to recognize our sacrifices in seeing it get fulfilled. Success can be construed as a mutually beneficial byproduct of a union when one is strong and fertile, but also evidence of what we personally brought to the equation despite the other when we’re picking through the past to dissect what went wrong and who’s to blame. We…

REVIEW: Waves [2019]

2019/12/032020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

All we have is now. Ronald Williams (Sterling K. Brown) tells his son Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) what so many parents do: “You don’t know how lucky you are.” What are those words besides a pat on the adult’s back for providing a decent life for their child, though? To me they’re often a source of resentment on behalf of the son or daughter receiving them because they’re very much a deflection wherein the parent places blame for whatever is wrong on the kid’s shoulders. Rather than have a conversation…

REVIEW: Queen & Slim [2019]

2019/11/272020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

Can I be your legacy? Despite what your Fox News watching relatives say, Black people in America aren’t asking to be killed. They aren’t “thugs” leeching off a system those same folks are banking on to carry them through retirement. And their rage at being left for slaughter isn’t an excuse for you to wield a badge like a southern slave owner. So when a young couple lurch their car while driving at night, they aren’t baiting a cop to pull them over. That teetotaler praying before diner food and…

REVIEW: The Souvenir [2019]

2019/11/202020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

Very much in love. Love is a powerful drug. There’s the unadulterated high when things are going good and the debilitating anguish upon suffering withdrawal. We chase the former and fall into bad habits to avoid the latter—sacrificing everything we want to achieve for ourselves in order to sustain a union we cannot fathom being without. So even though Anthony (Tom Burke) is the only one shooting heroin, he’s not the only addict drawn by The Souvenir‘s writer/director Joanna Hogg. As he constantly asks Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) for money…

REVIEW: Feast of the Seven Fishes [2019]

2019/11/142020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

What the hell is nostalgia? Titled after the Southern Italian tradition that made its way across the Atlantic to become a part of many Italian-American families’ Christmas Eve celebrations, Robert Tinnell‘s adaptation of his own graphic novel/recipe book Feast of the Seven Fishes does well to center itself upon its food even if the people eating it prove the real focal point. It’s probably not a coincidence then that most of our attention is specifically spent on seven teens with a direct or peripheral connection to dinner at Grandpa Johnny’s…

REVIEW: Clueless [1995]

2019/10/272020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

I totally paused! I’m not sure why we picked Amy Heckerling‘s Clueless five days after it opened (I save my ticket stubs), but I do remember enjoying it. Not in spite of assumptions either—unless we went because it was the only PG-13 film out (I became a teenage six months earlier). Maybe my love of cinema as more than superficially reductive genres with targeted demographics existed even then since that two-week span also included Apollo 13 and Nine Months. And because I wouldn’t have known about Jane Austen or Heckerling’s…

BIFF19 REVIEW: Online Billie [2019]

2019/10/182020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

It’s simple until it all gets complicated. Despite opening Online Billie with a glimpse of the titular camgirl (Valentine Payen-Wicaksono‘s Esther/”Billie”) engaged in a chat room session, she’s not the lead character. Director Lou Assous and co-writer Xavier Bazoge have very clearly created her as a hypothetical instead—a test with which their surrogate in the story (Baptiste Lorber‘s Jules) can confront his biases and wrap his head around the revelation that the woman he’s falling for is a sex worker. This isn’t inherently a problem for the whole considering his…

BIFF19 REVIEW: Malaisia [2019]

2019/10/102020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

This side of the Mississippi. There’s a joke told about a third of the way through Mac Cappuccino‘s film Malaisia. It’s bad. Jay Schmidt is the one laying out the excessive amount of exposition while his compatriot (Kevin Guzewich) looks on in exasperation—at one point even interrupting his interminable drone with an interjection to break up the monotony. On and on it goes and we’re unsure what to think as viewers since we haven’t even seen these two characters since the very first scene wherein the roles were reversed and…

BIFF19 REVIEW: The Sympathy Card [2019]

2019/10/082020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

Consider it a death-bed order. It’s an unorthodox but sweetly unsurprising premise: the cancer-stricken Emma (Petey J. Gibson) demands her wife Josie (Nika Ezell Pappas) meet someone new so she won’t become a lonely widow without love. This turn of events doesn’t surprise because writer/director Brendan Boogie already presented the unbelievably awkward way in which their relationship began. Emma is therefore right to worry the odds aren’t in their favor that Josie absentmindedly elbows another unsuspecting match in the nose to break the ice and ignite a guilt-fueled confidence that…

BIFF19 REVIEW: Rendezvous in Chicago [2019]

2019/10/012020/03/23 Jared Mobarak

The whole point of this game is to look. There’s a reason the first word in Michael Glover Smith‘s triptych Rendezvous in Chicago isn’t pluralized despite consisting of three distinct stories. It stems from the fact that Smith sought to close out his cinematic trilogy about on-screen relationships and communications within (Cool Apocalypse and Mercury in Retrograde are the others) with the three possible stages of a romantic union. Rather than call each chapter a rendezvous, the title is referring to our engagement with them as the beginning, middle, and…

TIFF19 REVIEW: Tenki no ko [Weathering with You] [2019]

2019/09/142020/03/24 Jared Mobarak

Or maybe not not. Teenagers get plenty of flack these days with derogatory labels thrust upon them by older generations refusing to truly look outside their window at how much the world has changed. They’ve a lot to shoulder with the pressure of living up to impossible and antiquated expectations, confusion as to a future and identity they can’t quite decipher yet, and the crippling reality that the world around them is literally crumbling via war, genocide, and climate change. Kids used to run from home as a means of…