Category: Shorts

REVIEW: Cousin Ben Troop Screening with Jason Schwartzman [2012]

Jared Mobarak

“Why? Why? I don’t know.” A Funny or Die exclusive promoting the release of Moonrise Kingdom, Cousin Ben Troop Screening with Jason Schwartzman is a two-minute piece directed by the feature’s Wes Anderson with co-writing duties from Roman Coppola. Schwartzman reprises his role as Cousin Ben while the children paying admission to watch his tented screening of the film are all revealed to be familiar faces from it as well. This causes a meta crisis considering they are characters speaking about the very world they exist inside as a fiction…

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REVIEW: RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“Oh Radha, you are voluptuous, pure and always forgiving, the source of life itself, our beloved, delightful as a blossoming lotus.” An art piece bridging Vijay Iyer‘s newest energetic composition as played by the International Contemporary Ensemble and stunning footage of Holi celebrations in the Braj region of India, RADHE RADHE: Rites of Holi proves an invigorating experience of cultural tradition. Inspired by the centennial of Stravinsky-Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Iyer and director Prashant Bhargava looked to explore their own heritage’s demarcation of the season’s change through song as…

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REVIEW: Feast [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“Wait” Just when you thought the generic American tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets married, and boy and girl have children was officially exhausted, Disney finds a way to tell it from a fresh perspective: the dog. This is the gimmick behind the studio’s newest, almost completely silent, short film Feast—the story of which came from Nicole Mitchell and Raymond S. Persi before animator Patrick Osborne took the reins as writer/director. They ensure that it only takes one French fry to grow little Winston’s appetite for…

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REVIEW: That Terrible Jazz [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“I’m gonna kick up some dirt” A senior film student at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, Mike Falconi went noir for his thesis short That Terrible Jazz. The piece has an obvious affinity for past cinematic greats with hard-boiled dialogue, a stoic lead, and the missing persons mystery at its core, but his love for the genre inevitably becomes overshadowed by the resource limitations such a project inherently finds itself combating. It’s tough to critique acting when most of the performers are likely as green as their director, so I’ll…

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REVIEW: Hotel Chevalier [2007]

Jared Mobarak

“I didn’t say you could come here” An unplanned prologue (to his producers) accompanying Wes Anderson‘s fifth film The Darjeeling Limited, Hotel Chevalier tells the story of Jack Whitman’s (Jason Schwartzman) complicated love. You could watch the feature without it and not lose much, but including it in the experience definitely adds something special like every hidden detail inside Anderson’s work. Besides seeing the context surrounding the bottle of perfume Jack finds in his suitcase and understand what Natalie Portman is doing in a blink and you’ll miss her cameo,…

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REVIEW: Berenice [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“I wanted it to hurt” One chapter from the horror anthology Creepers, Jeremiah Kipp‘s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe‘s disturbing short story Berenice finds itself hindered by what I can only guess was a shoestring budget. A director who has excelled at creating stunning pitch-black tone with ambiguously delicious mystery in carefully composed thrillers, this twenty-minute horror finds itself delivering more unintentional laughs than frightening scares. The over-the-top and often amateurish acting does no favors and its brightly lit digital presentation of footage with a do-it-yourself sensibility puts the artifice…

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REVIEW: In Da Street [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“We’re two cops in the hood, man” For a crowdfunded French short shot in two days on only a $1,500 budget, In Da Street looks fantastic. This shouldn’t be surprising coming from writer/director Damien Kazan—a filmmaker whose last work Whisper was nothing if not an attractive visual poem. Building on that film’s stylistic construction, this actioner follows a pair of cops on their beat with plenty of image-based stimulation. His non-descript Spanish-speaking locale (at least to an American like me) provides a hot afternoon of girls in bikinis and cigar-smoking…

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TIFF14 REVIEW: Still [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“See? Told you everything would be fine.” Co-written with Kaveh Mohebbi and directed by Slater Jewell-Kemker, the psychological science fiction Still is a captivating yarn I initially believed was done a disservice by being too short. I found myself wondering about these characters—Emily Piggford‘s Sadie and Giacomo Gianniotti‘s Jake—and what their dynamic was before getting stranded in the gorgeous snowy woods where he grew up. There’s definitely love between them despite his first interaction with her onscreen being a vicious slap to her face. Even so, when they reach an…

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TIFF14 REVIEW: Listen [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“Go home and pray” There is no more apt title for Hamy Ramezan and Rungano Nyoni‘s Listen except maybe Comprehend. A 13-minute gut punch dealing with the disparity of culture, language, and religion, to say too much would ruin the perfectly orchestrated dissemination of information from start to finish. It asks questions like: What do we do when we cannot ask for help? What can we do if those meant to help start reacting subjectively rather than with the victim’s wellbeing at heart? Our world has become so flat so…

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TIFF14 REVIEW: Knuffen [The Shove] [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“I was sentenced to a shoving last night” With an opening credit sequence recalling a 70s vibe via Quentin Tarantino, My Sandström‘s surrealist take on the paranoia of uncertainty delivers humor rather than the pulpy drama you may expect from the grainy picture and thick yellow text. There is a lot of this sort of playing with expectation involved right down to Tobbe’s (Magnus Sundberg) giant of a man being crippled by the absurdist “sentence” given to him by an inspector (Annafrida Bengtsson) of unknown origins walking the streets with…

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TIFF14 REVIEW: Sanlúnche fu [Tricycle Thief] [2014]

Jared Mobarak

“Patience. Everything is fine.” With a title like Sanlúnche fu [Tricycle Thief], Maxim Bessmertnyi‘s film could go two ways. Is it about someone who steals a tricycle or about a thief that rides one? There is also a third option: a hybrid of both. This is the direction the writer/director chooses with his Macau-set tale of a desperate man about to be evicted from his home. He lives in a city rich and vibrant with mainlanders coming in all the time to win big and leave with smiles on their…

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