Sara Watches Stuff

Historically, I do not enjoy romantic comedies. I am a horror buff, I love thrillers, I enjoy action comedies and cars exploding, I can tell you every detail of every Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen travel movie, but as soon as romance gets in there on a serious level I tend to stop enjoying things. I'm a bitter weirdo who hates love! You have to throw in something campy for me to get on board, or at least make it queer. All that considered, I don't think anyone would be surprised that I deeply enjoyed  Crazy Rich Asians. Like Get Out and Girls Trip and Moonlight  and a whole host of other movies, it didn't matter at all whether or not I loved Crazy Rich Asians , because it is not about me. Not every movie needs to be about me. There were a lot of things in this movie that were not for me, and I loved that. The movie is based on Kevin Kwan's book of the same name, and it follows the story of an economics professor named Rachel (Constance Wu, who is outstanding) whose b...

When a movie is fairly universally regarded as terrifying, I become fixated on it. My fascination with horror as a genre has really hardened me to the notion of "scary", but Hereditary  was getting rave reviews and being called scary by all the people whose opinions result in critically acclaimed horror. I had to put on my cynical boots - a lot of these people also loved The VVitch , which I found very hit and miss, and the movie comes from the same producers. Still, my yearning to get to the bottom of what people consider to be a properly scary movie in the current day found an acceptable target.  With Hereditary , it's easy to see why people were so enraptured. It's a thrilling experience. For a relatively new filmmaker on the mainstream scene, Ari Aster has created a very tightly directed and composed movie. It follows a family after the death of Toni Collette's character's mother, through varying places of grief and understanding of the complexities...

It's the end of the year, and the film snobs of the world are reflecting on their years in pop culture. As one of the gang - now with my very own bogus DMCA notice! - I figured I would jump on in. Of course, there are lots of caveats to that. I live in Australia, where several of the last quarter films with award potential have their wide release withheld til the next year. I don't go to previews, with the exception of the occasional rubbish horror movie, and I am not drawn to a lot of wide release movies. Dunkirk ? More like...um... done-urgh . A lot of it is to do with my exhaustion with male narratives and a lot of the industry's treatment of women and anything non white or heterosexual, both real and in fiction. I love the art form, but it's been a tough year for trying to avoid content that would make me extremely angry in a very real way. As mentioned previously, I haven't seen any new releases - it's been the busiest time of the year in my sector - so ...

Happy Friday the 13th! Apparently people talk about horror movies in October? It's about Halloween, right? I'm Australian, and I'm honestly unfamiliar with the whole tradition. We aren't big on Halloween. We do like binge drinking and ignoring our deep systemic issues, so that's kind of the same thing.  What I am a big fan of is the horror genre. It started with my fascination and terror over The Ring , which I was first exposed to through its parody in Scary Movie 3 at a sleepover when I was much too young. All the while an avid reader of the Goosebumps books, this visual embodiment of fear was something new to me, and something I found absolutely petrifying. The idea of a ghost girl climbing out of the VCR had me sleepless for weeks. I hid my scariest Goosebumps books in boxes buried under clothes in the back of my wardrobe so that whatever monsters might ostensibly climb out would at least have to battle through a few layers of cotton. At some point, my fixati...

When Julia Ducournau's Raw   was first released, it gathered a lot of hype thanks to its reputation in regards visceral imagery and pretty confronting cannibalism story. I was worried that I would watch it and be let down, because reviews seemed generally positive and I'm always here for horror tinged plots driven by female directors and female protagonists. On finally watching Raw , I can tell you that it is barely a horror movie and barely a cannibalism movie at all: it is a thinly veiled allegory for burgeoning sexuality alongside themes of sisterhood and coming of age, all wrapped in the skin of cannibal tropes past. I loved it.  The story of Raw is not anything revolutionary. Someone (in this case, a first year vegetarian veterinary student named Justine played by Garance Marillier) gets forced to eat meat, and develops a taste for human flesh. There is nothing subtle in the way it is told - Justine's cravings for meat evoke a sexual awakening and echo her transfo...

If you haven't watched Ghost Ship , it might be a surprise when I tell you that Ghost Ship is a surprisingly good Ghosts-on-a-Boat movie. The opening scene of Ghost Ship is one of my favourite opening horror scenes of all time, and there's a reason it's so deeply beloved online. Turns out there's more to the movie than that! It came as a surprise to me when I first watched Ghost Ship  that a movie called Ghost Ship  could strike the near-perfect balance between being ridiculous and unnerving. From that spectacular opening scene to the next-level nonsensical murder madness is splashed throughout the film in a way that is hard not to enjoy. There were times when I found myself feeling genuinely jumpy because the atmosphere was so eerie. Put a murder mystery on a boat and stick in some ghosts and a whodunnit element and I'm all in, all the way. The cast also knocked it out of the park - Julianna Margulies was great, and it’s always nice seeing Emily Browning in th...

In January, I messed up. I accidentally watched what I still consider to be my favourite movie made in 2016 one month into the new year. Do I call it my favourite movie of 2016? Is it my favourite movie of 2017? Will I ever stop attempting to force people to watch Sing Street with me? With all of the 2016 hype around  La La Land , it seems like people forgot about the much smaller scale musical that was  Sing Street. It's a goddamn tragedy.   I have no real feelings about John Carney as a filmmaker - I haven’t seen  Once  or  Begin Again  - but I was so pleasantly swept up in this movie, which oozed the feel-good vibes that people credited to  La La Land  despite never being there.  The music was outstanding and the evocation of an 80s nostalgia on the Irish climate of the time. The fact that this didn't get nominated for any original song Oscars is still an outrage - to this day, "Up" and "Drive it Like You Stole It" feature heavil...

It wasn't that long ago that I watched Nacho Vigalondo’s oft-recommended time travel flick  Timecrimes , and while it wasn't to my specific tastes,  Colossal  seemed much more my speed. It might seem like a spoiler to tell you that it’s about the downwards-spiraling Gloria (Anne Hathaway) realising that the giant monster terrorizing Seoul happens to be echoing her movements while she sleeps, but that’s literally the plot and it’s fucking awesome.  This movie got me pumped up. It’s got great performances - Jason Sudekis plays Gloria’s childhood friend and he was truly excellent - and a lot more depth to it than it lets on, without feeling too silly or too cliché to me somehow. If the concept of the movie sounds good to you, if you like movies that combine large and small scale, and if you like your sci-fi to take a backseat to realism but still be present, just try to go see this and know as little as possible. Even though the giant monster thing isn’t a spoiler,...

Ginger Snaps  is cheesy and unsubtle and a bit overlong and often silly and  excellent .  It shouldn’t surprise you to read that - I am on record as loving and being a passionate advocate for female centric horror, so this tale of two sisters - with lycanthropy as a metaphor for puberty - was perfect for me.  It was also a fun adventure in who’s-that-guy searching, so get ready to go on a ride that won't be interesting to anyone who doesn't consume the pop culture that I do. Katharine Isabelle is wonderful as the titular Ginger, and went on to be one of many facets in my realisation of my bisexuality with her turn in American Mary  years later, but there’s also some real laughs going through the cast list. The two main male stars, whose voices both sounded super familiar, both went on to be in my favourite Final Destination movie together (the third one, with the roller coaster and my celebrity crush Mary Elizabeth Winstead) - the drug dealer as the goth gu...

In a way, I'm glad we've progressed beyond the initial inescapable hype around Get Out . Not because I'm sick of people talking about it - on the contrary, I'm happy to keep discussing it with everyone - but because I could not stand the constant need people would have to make the discussion into one about PC culture. Get Out is a movie with some important ideas in it, but it's also just a really good movie. It’s Jordan Peele making a foray into horror - still with a heavy comic edge, because what else would you expect? - and it follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) meeting his girlfriend’s very white and very odd family for the first time. Setting aside the incisive but admittedly unsubtle social commentary, it's well made and effective in what it sets out to do. It falls victim to the modern reliance on jump scares, which is possibly the biggest strike against it. You'll be primed to pick the beats and sometimes I found myself wishing they'd eased up on th...