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 ...

A lot of people have loved, and will continue to love,  Paul Feig's adaptation of the Darcey Bell suburban thriller novel A Simple Favour . It's been marketed aggressively - Blake Lively will simply not  stop wearing suits - and it's aiming to capitalise off the success of pulpy book-to-screen conversions like the exemplary Gone Girl  (largely thanks to David Fincher's eye for detail) or the legion of close copies it inspired. With slick, female led advertising and polarising early reviews, I wanted to enjoy this movie. I wanted it to be over the top and dramatic and twisty and lack too much self-seriousness. I wanted beautiful women, hopefully fluid in their sexuality, embroiled in mysteries. I wanted to look at Henry Golding some more . While I got one of those wishes, with a lot of my desires I was left...wanting. We're asked to follow Stephanie, played by Anna Kendrick, as she tries to get to the bottom of the disappearance of her new friend Em...

I'm still wary to write about the Ghostbusters  reboot. I wrote this post originally in 2017, and in 2018 I still feel like it's a sticky subject. Attitudes towards this movie are so often vitriolic and rooted in personal issues. I believe that the personal is the political, and my review is definitely one deeply informed by my own feminism married with my preferences in regards to film, but I think it's important to address greater issues in filmmaking and how they reflect the world around us. Everyone's opinions deserve respect but when they are purely a result of a misunderstanding of power balances in the world, it's really upsetting, and that was a lot of my problem with the first wave of reviews for the movie. Let's focus on discussing the cheap jokes and lazy plotting; let's not look at all at ideas about women in comedy. I'll make more points about female reboots when I get to writing about Ocean's 8 , which I saw recently and loved. Here ...

It's been a while since I've written about movies! I've been sick, trying desperately to make it to the end of my degree, and watching predominantly television. I have a lot of thoughts about, say, the racial politics on this season of RuPaul's Drag Race or on the casting problems with The Bachelorette or on the importance of kind television a la Queer Eye or Nailed It but the movies sitting in my drafts have been left unremarked upon. That ead against all changes now. Time to ease back in with something that doesn't make me want to bang my head against my computer for discursive reasons but rather for very different reasons: let's talk about the new Jurassic World movie. I've never written about a Jurassic Park movie on this blog, but my history with the franchise is not one worth extensive literature. I watched the first movie in about sixth grade, and presumably there was some theoretical basis for that because I remember looking forward to classes ...

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...

It's very hard to be fair on Love, Simon  when it is so clearly a coming-of-age movie for teenagers because I want to hold cinema about LGBT youth to such a different standard. That's wrong on my part, because gay film should be allowed to be phenomenal and terrible and also just mediocre. At the same time, as a Vocally Bisexual Woman with my own complicated views surrounding representation and stereotype, I want to see great media about my own story and the stories of my friends and the stories of other people who deserve to see themselves in the things they consume. In many aspects, Love, Simon was successful! As a story of a gay youth working out high school, it is deft in its handling of sexuality and relationships. Sadly, as a teen high school movie, it's more than just awkward. The plot of the movie is not unfamiliar. We're introduced to the eponymous Simon, played by Nick Robinson (not, thankfully, the gross games journalist of the same name), who tells us that...

Inevitably, we come to the time of year where the big awards are being handed out and the Oscars are upon us and it turns out I have not seen any critically acclaimed movies this year. Well, except Get Out , which I am so happy to see getting the recognition it deserves. There's a whole rant brewing about social commentary being dismissed by horror fans (because scariness is all that matters) and not being taken seriously by the broader community (because it's just a scary movie) that totally disregards the excellent direction and writing and overall work in a movie like that. My other favourites from the year were a little left of centre: Raw  deserved something for Foreign Language but it was one of the more visceral horror films around and  Colossal  was technically screened at TIFF 2016 and it was pretty weird. I do tend to make it a mission to see films with lots of buzz, because I want to be educated before I make any sweeping statements on them. While trailers ...

It's that magical time of year...where Love Actually plays on television at least once a week.  There is nothing to be said about Richard Curtis' personal masterwork on the magic of love that someone on the internet hasn't already said. I'm partial to the Christmas countdown of daily Love Actually watches by Courtney Enlow at Pajiba , personally. Christopher Orr at The Atlantic offers what came to be a pretty standard modern response to the movie, in that it is a piece of junk depiction of romance. Lindy West at Jezebel broke it down. On the 10th anniversary of Love Actually , the world learned to hate it. Michael Koziol penned an interesting piece in defence of the movie at The Gaurdian; also at Pajiba, Joe Starr with one of my favourite hot takes entitled " Love Actually is a problematic movie and ugh who f*cking cares?" .  Let's focus on the more important things, people! Were we really all still wearing turtlenecks in 2003? There is not nearly e...

I read The Glass Castle , Jeanette Walls' memoir, back when my mother read it for her book club in 2008. I thought it was appropriately affecting, and the writing was fine, but it wasn't my favourite book - even though I don't mind media that dwells in its misery, but this particular book didn't strike the balance for me. All that considered, the movie adaptation was...faithful. It was well acted and well executed and a near completely faithful retelling of Walls' novelization of her youth. Whether or not that's a good thing depends on how much you enjoy this kind of story. I'll cop to having a low tolerance for the kind of story that spans a lifetime, focusing in on moments of woe to show the extraordinariness of one person. I wish more focus had been given to the adult characters of Walls' siblings, so it felt perhaps less self-indulgent. Alternatively, I would have enjoyed it much more if the jumps between past and past-present hadn't been so ab...

This movie came to me with rave reviews as a part of a curated selection of films. The critic who spoke to me about it - an actual movie critic - talked about the movie's much celebrated subversion of romantic comedy tropes and Rebecca Miller's directorial dedication to the honest, messy depiction of adulthood and romance. They also talked about Miller almost entirely in terms of who her father is and who her husband is, so I wasn't taking the greatest stock in his view of the movie from a critical feminist angle. The story had potential: a woman plans to have a kid on her own, but it's complicated when she falls for a fucking loser of a professor at the university she works for who also happens to be married with kids. While I appreciated those two things - the movie is unwavering in its commitment to the messiness of romantic and familial entanglements, and it is both romantic and a comedy without falling into the rom-com class - I also found the frustration I felt ...

I wrote fairly recently about my favourite horror movies and my twisted love affair with the Saw  franchise. When the movies were still getting released, I never got the chance to share in the Halloween tradition of horror releases, because no one else I knew cared at all. And so at 9:30pm on Halloween this year, I donned a bunch of fake blood and some hastily drawn jigsaw pieces and watched a new goddamn   Saw movie. Upfront and honest: Jigsaw  is not a good movie. It does not stand alone, and you will not enjoy it if you do not enjoy the movies as a whole. There was an obvious attempt made at creating an independent piece that stood apart from the seven films prior but still tied into the mythos, and while the game plan is clear, I wouldn't call it successful because it doesn't really make sense when viewed as a part of the series as a whole. As a reboot, it's just average; as a sequel (an octquel?) it's sub-par.  Jigsaw  is obsessed with creating a ...

I know I've mentioned before my personal affinity for Big Fucked Up Family Movies, but I hate how often they neglect the exploration of the actual family dynamics and instead try to pile shock on shock. It's very much Alexandre Aja's modus operandi - he directed this remake along with 2003's  High Tension  - as he seems to thrive on creating movies that push the limits of "too far", but does so with choices that are often hard to track. As a big horror fan, I like to see people in movies get confronted with impossible situations. I want characters' limits tested. Aja's take on Wes Craven's 1977 movie follows the same story, where a family traveling through the desert find themselves stranded and under attack from a family of (sigh) mutant cannibals. I haven't seen Craven's movie, though it is generally agreed that the remake is superior; my issues with this movie come more from the carnival of horrors way the antagonists are deployed, not...

Sometimes I watch a movie and a joke is made in the first few minutes that lets me know that there's going to be a sense of humour present that will just not gel with me. In this particular Netflix original, it was probably the excess of jokes about "taking it out the butt" and calling the main character a pussy. For all of the times when we might not agree about what "funny" is, there are flashes of something special in The Babysitter . It makes the other stuff even worse. Oh, horror comedy, you tricky little nut of a genre. The Babysitter  follows a kid as he learns that his super hot babysitter is also a super devout devil worshipper who might be sacrificing people after he's gone to bed. Fun plot, generally well executed. Samara Weaving is great as the titular babysitter, and the teenage actors are remarkably un-painful. In fact, once the movie gets over how great it thinks it is, it ends up being pretty good.  I've mentioned that I like my horro...

Let's Be Evil is the cinematographic embodiment of a downward spiral. I was lured in by interesting visuals and then everything from there was a mess. But while I'm on a horror movie review kick for October, let's nut this one out! The premise deserves credit for trying to use creepy kids in a different way. A top secret operation employs three cash hungry twenty somethings to be caretakers for a bunch of genius kids in an augmented reality brain training facility, but complications unsurprisingly result in a plot that is focused on trying to look cool and be different rather than tell a human story.  The major issue I had with Let's Be Evil was that so much of the plot and the character emotions are told through outright dialogue, rather than shown through action. It’s stuff that your screenwriting teacher would have rolled their eyes at - characters straight up saying “It’s a puzzle. Like that one from earlier.” Give your audience some credit. The visual medium ...

I'm pretty sure everyone who watched the trailer for this movie got the gist of the plot: it's Groundhog Day , but with murder. Of course, our lead - played by the film's absolute standout actor, Jessica Rothe - has never seen Groundhog Day  and has apparently never heard of it, because it takes her an absurdly long time to try to be a better person. Instead, she spends a long time trying to solve her own murder by a weird person in a creepy baby mask. So her own murder happens again and again and again. Happy Death Day  definitely has flashes of greatness. As a murder mystery, it is far more effective than as a horror movie. You really want to know whodunnit. They really do set up everyone as a suspect, and they do so in a way that actually kept me guessing. I kept reading real answers as red herrings and misleads as the real deal. The final resolve ended up being quite disappointing, but I think that's because as a movie lover, I kept wanting the killer to be bigger...