Tag: Mike Birbiglia

TIFF16 REVIEW: Tramps [2017]

Jared Mobarak

“Kids menu or appetizers?” The romantic comedy formula is one that can’t help but become redundant in premise. How many different scenarios are there for two people to converge? Even so, Adam Leon may have found a new one with his meet-cute during a dead-drop gone wrong called Tramps. It should have been a painless exchange: Ellie (Grace Van Patten) picks up Danny (Callum Turner), they retrieve a briefcase with unknown contents, and deliver said case to a woman with a green purse at the train station. She may have…

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REVIEW: Don’t Think Twice [2016]

Jared Mobarak

“Your favorite bunch of weirdoes” The type of films that sting the most are the ones that are universal in emotion despite being niche in subject. So what if this tight-knit group of contemporaries championing each other’s work as they strive to improve their own are improv comedians selling out a fifty-seat theater in New York City and you’re a mechanic or barista or garbage collector or Fortune 500 CEO. It doesn’t matter what they or you do as long as we’re all human: fallible, petty, vulnerable, delusional, and somehow…

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REVIEW: Trainwreck [2015]

Jared Mobarak

“Monogamy isn’t realistic” Here I thought I could blame the editor for why Judd Apatow‘s films have been lackluster and overlong since The 40-Year-Old Virgin only to discover his latest Trainwreck is the first of his theatrical quintet not in part handled by Brent White. Instead we have William Kerr, Peck Prior, and Paul Zucker: three people who either failed to explain that a scene shouldn’t remain in the final cut just because it’s funny or three people who ultimately were ignored and/or sequentially replaced by one another. Don’t get…

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