Tag: Balthazar Getty

REVIEW: kid 90 [2021]

Jared Mobarak

What happens once I unlock it? My mindset entering Soleil Moon Frye‘s autobiographical documentary kid 90 anticipated a fun, nostalgic, low stakes look at kid celebrities. That’s what the slew of happy photos depicting teenaged Stephen Dorff, Brian Austin Green, and Balthazar Getty smiling sells: their childhood adventures as inseparable friends and peers removed from the otherwise tumultuous Hollywood machine. Frye only adds to that image when starting things off by saying, “this is an account of what it meant to be a child in the 1990s.” Expectations are therefore…

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REVIEW: Lost Highway [1997]

Jared Mobarak

“I like to remember things my own way” POSSIBLE SPOILERS Every cinephile has a moment when “the movies” became more than entertainment. Mine was David Lynch‘s Lost Highway. It was my first foray into the auteur’s catalog—a viewing that occurred three or four years after its initial release courtesy of a rented VHS cassette tape. My experience with film as an art form had progressed beyond usual action or comedy reprieves from real life challenges, but no indie drama yet seen had quite the same unparalleled effect in its dementedly…

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REVIEW: Big Sur [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“The circle’s closed in on the old heroes of the night” I’ve never read a novel by Jack Kerouac—the only Beat Generation tome I have leafed through is William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—but I imagine the experience is similar to that of watching director Michael Polish’s adaption of the author’s 1962 work, Big Sur. About eighty-five percent driven by voiceover narration assumedly being read directly out of the book to be heard above a sprawling Explosions in the Sky-lite score from The National and gorgeously composed images of the On…

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