James Marsh | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: King of Thieves [2018]

2019/01/142020/03/30 Jared Mobarak

Stop talking shop. She’ll turn in her grave. It’s not about the robbery. King of Thieves wouldn’t be worth telling if it was just watching these senior actors ranging sixty-years old to eighty-five fictitiously accomplish the “biggest jewel heist in British history” since there obviously won’t be any foot-chases or complex wire-suspended acrobatics. No, the reason this tale (adapted by Joe Penhall from a Vanity Fair article by Mark Seal) proves interesting is due to the characters they portray. How do diabetes, incontinence, and hearing loss affect their chances of…

REVIEW: The Mercy [2018]

2018/11/272020/03/31 Jared Mobarak

What if I tell them I’m here? I had never heard of Donald Crowhurst before seeing James Marsh‘s film The Mercy. This is unsurprising since the British Sunday Times‘ Golden Globe Race of which he was a competitor occurred in 1968, not quite fifteen years before my birth. And if his would-be return-date to Teignmouth, England of July 1969 after yachting around the world without stop or assistance was ingrained in my mind for any event—auspicious or infamous—it was the moon landing. So when the synopsis described this amateur sailor…

REVIEW: The Theory of Everything [2014]

2014/11/222014/11/25 Jared Mobarak

“The little one has done it” To me Stephen Hawking has always been synonymous with physics I will never understand and that ubiquitous computerized voice cracking snide jokes. Until I saw the trailer for James Marsh‘s The Theory of Everything I never even knew he was once able to walk. It was kind of a mind blowing revelation for an ignorant fellow such as myself—one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century bound to a wheelchair without motor function suddenly shown to have been a once vibrant young Cambridge…

REVIEW: Project Nim [2011]

2012/01/022014/05/15 Jared Mobarak

“It’s the humans I wanted to leave; not the project” If James Marsh‘s documentary Project Nim tells us anything it’s that you must lay out the objectives of scientific experiments concerning animals before heading blindly into them. Columbia University’s Herbert Terrace wanted to see if he could teach a chimpanzee how to communicate by integrating one into a family of humans from birth but never took into consideration the intrinsic emotional and psychological bond we make with those we raise. Enlisting former student—and sexual partner—Stephanie LaFarge to be the surrogate…