Tag: Penny Lane

TIFF21 REVIEW: Listening to Kenny G [2021]

Jared Mobarak

I don’t think I’m a personality to people. I think I’m a sound. While the premise of Penny Lane‘s Listening to Kenny G unfolds through the comedic question, “Why do so many people hate Kenny G?” it quickly reveals itself a rather intriguing tight rope walk upon the line separating art from commerce. Because this question cannot be answered without first acknowledging who the “people” are. Kenny G has fans. A lot of them. He’s sold seventy-five million records to become the best-selling instrumentalist of all-time. So, they aren’t those…

Read More

REVIEW: Hail Satan? [2019]

Jared Mobarak

Very quickly everything got real. There’s subjectively no greater terrorist threat to America than Evangelical Christians. At their side is Catholicism: itself an extremist branch of Christianity shouldering centuries of blood and abuse on its hands spanning genocide, murder, rape, and child abuse. It’s these Christian zealots who yell that Muslims are bringing Sharia Law to our country with no basis in fact besides fear-mongering propaganda propagated by government officials rejecting the Constitution’s secular tenets for those of God’s Ten Commandments. They have spent so much energy vilifying other groups…

Read More

REVIEW: Our Nixon [2013]

Jared Mobarak

“You felt as if you were in a brilliantly lighted, badly run television show” As someone who wasn’t born during Richard Nixon‘s administration, it is somewhat unfair to just conjure images of Deepthroat a la All the President’s Men or bank robbers like in Point Break. Tricky Dick has become the butt of jokes—the only president to ever resign his post and quite possibly the most infamous to have held office. He bugged himself, unwittingly had those personal tapes become his political demise, and walked into the fire under his…

Read More