Sara Watches Stuff

The beauty of art lies in its ability to make an audience feel things. Great art can make you laugh, can make you cry, can set you alight with passion to share or to argue. Book Club  has yet to make me shed a tear, but we're two from three. Is this movie about four older ladies reading 50 Shades of Grey secretly the best movie of 2018??????????? No. But it very well might be the best bad movie of 2018. It might actually be the movie I have the most to say about of 2018. Unlike so many other movies of its kind, Book Club takes no shame in what it is. The director, Bill Holdermann, and his wife who wrote it with him, knew exactly what demographic they were aiming for in crafting this movie. Every single element of the plot, from the perfectly pitched racy for the over-sixty set jokes to the movie's complete ignorance of how the dating app bumble. works is done with a wink and a nudge to the audience both of target demographic and beyond it, rolling their eyes. Every si...

When I watched the trailer for the new adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull , directed by Michael Mayer, I felt a deep sense of sinking dread. Not every movie is made with every person in mind, and that is absolutely fine! But The Seagull  was most certainly not made for me. The trailer reminded me of a trailer from the early 00s, where rather than cutting together moments, an entire scene played out. An entire scene, full of uncompressed Chekhov dialogue and overzealous musical cues. I turned to my mother, with whom I was about to sit slack-jawed through Book Club , and said "That looks...long." Almost every review I've read of The Seagull , a problem with movie reviews in general, is written by a man in his forties. Occasionally a woman, always white. This movie is oppressively white. This movie is stuffy. It is presented for an audience who are familiar Chekhov, who want to rub their university educations on their friends when they tell them "The new Chekhov ...

There are movies with great ingredients that cannot succeed in spite of themselves. 2015's teenage spy rom com Barely Lethal is sadly one of the prime example of that, because for all of the elements that might be deemed watchable or all of the things you might think would make it good, no amount of charisma can pull writing like this out of the garbage. I am not one to over critique teenage girl movies while giving male fantasy a pass. I love Fast & Furious movies shamelessly, but I also will defend teenage girl franchises to the end of time. I can critique the issues with the Twilight movies while finding the vitriol directed at them to be absurd and disproportionate (Lindsay Ellis has an excellent video essay on this topic that I recommend to everyone). There is nothing wrong for making movies for or about teenagers, and there have been some excellent - or even just serviceable - ones in recent years! They can be problematic as all hell, but still elevate their material b...

This is not going to be a traditional movie review because as you will have read, I have nothing new to say about the movie other than the fact that it was garbage and I am disappointed in everyone involved.  I can't give a plot summary, because the story hasn't changed from adaptation to adaptation, nor from the initial novel. I can't praise the acting, because everyone is playing their lazy roles, doing whatever exerts the least energy to earn a paycheck. I can't say much for the scenery, because the movie is spent on a train in the snow bar a scene or two in Jerusalem and embarking on the train journey.  I can't really say anything, other than the fact that I hope Daisy Ridley and Leslie Odom Jr. and Lucy Boynton and the couple of other people in this movie that I don't mind had a fun time shooting with all of their peers, and that I'm glad Johnny Depp's character died pretty quickly so that I didn't have to look at his face for too long. Ra...

I have seen so many genuinely good movies over the last few weeks - I saw The Shape of Water ! I projected lots of things on to Call Me By Your Name ! - and yet all I want to talk about is this godawful disaster movie with Gerard Butler. It takes place slightly in the future, where climate change has been stabilized and then...destabalized, for nefarious purposes. Gerard Butler is a space scientist who needs to fix climate change, obviously, and Jim Sturgess is his brother in the government trying to solve things back on Earth. It's absolutely buckwild. Think The Day After Tomorrow , but everything is worse. It's amazing. They spend so much of this movie counting down to the titular geostorm, but we are never actually given a proper explanation for the storm in question. The characters shout buzzwords and phrases and I'm not sure anyone understands what's actually happening. The president gets to say things like "Because I'm the goddamn president of the Uni...

Or “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising″, as it apparently launched abroad.  Continuing my Zac Efron Garbage Reviews. Thankfully Neighbours 2 does their light, low-thought thing without always caving to the lowest common denominator. It lands some solid jokes as well as some ridiculously silly ones, and that’s totally fine, because it’s not also being bland and aggressively horrible the whole time. Female characters are allowed to be gross, but they’re also allowed to be funny and smart and kind of awful and it’s all mostly balanced out. The cast were great together and with a couple of exceptions it was good performances all round (I thought Chloe Grace Moretz was the weak link, which was rough with her in the main role). I don’t think it talked too far down at young women either, which is a risk with the subject matter. It basically follows a new sorority next door to the couple from the last movie - the too-good-for-this Rose Byrne and the exactly-right-for-this Seth Rogen - and the...

After a brief flirtation with serious pop cultural critique, I'm back to reviewing the horror movie rubbish that no one else has seen (and for good reason). What better way to settle into that niche than to watch one of the many hundreds of Saw copycats on the market? It's my own personal white noise. Saw itself is one of the most problematic and ideologically iffy film franchises around with one of the best first movies, and I'm unapologetically hyped for the next movie to come out. The ripoffs, however, are...something.  In my time watching blatant Saw ripoffs, I have seen some utter garbage. Even I, the most dedicated terrible movie watcher, could not sit through the monotony and bad acting of 2011's Vile . I struggled through 2006 Thai thriller 13 Beloved , even when it made me near gag, or 2014's Circle , even though I nearly fell asleep . Over time, I've enjoyed the occasional movie in this specific set up: I didn't mind the divisive Would You Ra...

Ever wanted to peek back in time and glance at what life was like in the late 00s? You might think "Hey, I'll watch Picture This starring Ashley Tisdale!" As someone who vividly remembers 2009 in spite of desperate attempts to repress it, I can conclusively say that this is not what life was like in the late 00s. This movie is garbage. The only explanation I can think of for this movie is that it takes place in an alternate universe. Nothing makes sense. It’s high school, but it’s a weird version of high school where Ashley Tisdale is the Total Loser (she wears glasses! Only nerdy losers wear glasses!) and popularity is defined by wealth. Sure, except Ashley Tisdale’s Mandy is supposed to be on the outs and her house is comically large and her father showers her in expensive gifts? There are so many dark things hinted at that get zero explanation: a side character’s mother has a severe drinking problem, there is casual witchcraft, lost children, and the tiny fact that ...

I’m not going to pretend that this is a good movie.  In fact, it’s garbage. It’s derivative, predictable, poorly performed, ill thought out and bland. It lacks self-awareness and creativity and instead draws entirely from the canon of better movies that came before.  Our evil entity is called the Bye Bye Man, for fuck’s sake, but if you think about him or speak his name, the concept gains strength and takes over your mind. Our three sprightly college students learn this after moving to a new house and discovering the legend hidden on a nightstand. Scary things happen, but they’re just in people’s heads! Time passes strangely - almost as strangely as the accents that characters slip in and out of! The Bye Bye guy appears in shadows and reflections with scare chords, accompanied by some weird spectral hound! No one has any character development or backstory whatsoever! The lighting is truly atrocious and I spent half the movie wondering what was actually happening on screen...

I need a “Sara’s watching garbage” jingle. This is the first post on this converted blog with one of the truly, truly garbage entries! What utter garbage this movie was.  I know you have to set aside some judgement on the science side of things, because this is a movie about one of ~those~ super drugs and in this case, Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is unwillingly used as a drug mule for said super drug until it ruptures in her guts and allows her to unlock - you guessed it -  100% of her brain . Yeah. It’s  Limitless , but a little more self aware. And when I say "a little", I mean it. They know we want to see Scarlett Johansson beating people up and manipulating the physical world, but they don't trust us enough to want to watch it done with any semblance of realism. So at this point I've set aside what little I know about the science of drugs and neurology, but even ignoring all of that body bullshit, it's impossible to ignore the reality imposed on you within ...