Sara Watches Stuff

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...

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 so much easier to write about bad films than good ones. I am overflowing with thoughts to share about the most memorably awful movies I watched on my trip - I really, really want to talk about Geostorm  - but there's very little I can say about Guillermo del Toro's newly Oscar winning film about a woman who falls in love with a fish man that has not already been said. You don't need me to tell you that del Toro makes beautiful movies, or that the creature creation in this (though no Pan's Labyrinth ) is spectacular. You don't need me to tell you that the visual effects in this are phenomenal, or that the music is wonderful, or that it transported me to another world. If you're looking for reviews of The Shape of Water at this point in 2018, what you need me to tell you is that a movie featuring not only boning down with a fish-man but also a female masturbation scene and a disabled woman finding her agency. If the main playing field of this blog is femi...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It's hard to talk about movies that you end up just sort of watching to kill some time, but this one is a favourite of a close friend so it felt like something I really needed to get to. It's a pretty great exercise in watching pre-"political correctness gone mad" world (if I ever use that phrase in earnest, it's an invasion of the body snatchers situation) movies because you don't have to constant excuse it - "It was a different time", "It was okay to say that then". The First Wives Club stands pretty strong in 2017 as a story of the ins and outs of female bonding and empowerment and finding balance. It's not without flaw, but I didn't feel grimy watching it in the way I do when I watch a lot of 90s movies casually fling around slurs. The cast of the movie is naturally its biggest drawcard: even the minor rolls are recognisable faces, with the whole plot kicking off as Stockard Channing - the erstwhile Rizzo - commits suicide, t...

I feel like I speak a lot about psychological thrillers set at dinner parties. It’s easy to see why they're so popular, and I've written about before - they're an easy and effective set up, with minimal exposition, that throws our characters into a situation together and allows for the weird shit to go down. In  Coherence,  a comet is passing overhead, and weird shit goes down. It’s hard to talk thoroughly about this movie without going into spoiler territory, but I’d say that if you’re a fan of when movies get a little pseudo-science and quasi-cerebral, you'll probably get into Coherence . I'm trying to draw comparisons: the most obvious comparison is to another recent dinner party thriller, The Invitation , which I haven't posted my review for yet. It also very strongly evoked the movie Triangle for me, which you'll probably like if you get into this one or vice versa. It's like a time travel movie for people who don't want to watch a time trave...

They made a whole movie about evil genetically modified crops! At least it’s not angry trees. The fact that this movie is about THE CONSPIRACY OF GM made it a little hard for me to take seriously - it would have been fine for switching off my brain, until they got to the end and started urging me to join them in the fight against GM crops. I don’t know. Your movie should stand on its own without needing to actually put messages in at the end.  It follows, mostly, a mother (Zoe Lister-Jones, who is the highlight of the movie with her gradual unraveling) whose son has started getting sick, and in desperation for an answer she traces the genetically modified food conspiracy. The strongest bits of this movie are when it focuses on the Lister-Jones’ character’s history with mental health problems and how this plays into her struggle to get to the bottom of her son’s ailments while separating real from delusion and paranoia in an increasingly unbelievable spiral. I wish the whole movi...

Every instinct I have is telling me to call this a "fun movie about teenage witches", but it is absolutely not . There is very little about this movie that is fun, unless you really enjoy teenage girls tormenting each other relentlessly. In fact, this has all of the things that worry me in a movie: active racism, rape and vivid self harm imagery. I'm torn, because it genuinely is a pretty interesting movie and I love teenage witches. The Craft:  it's complicated. The cast of this movie is amazing. It's a veritable who's who of people-who-were-in-90s-high-school-movies! From Skeet Ulrich to Neve Campbell and Robin Tunney and Breckin Meyer who apparently spent a solid twenty years playing high school boys, there's no denying that everyone in this was having fun and almost solidly kicking it out of the park. There are definitely some stunted performances, and most of the time I chalked that up to the high school setting, but everyone is either playing it...

While I’m not usually one for the grand biopic style of movie and lack strong ties to these particular historical figures, I found myself curious about Natalie Portman’s much-discussed performance in it as Jackie Kennedy following her husband's assassination. As a movie, it seems pretty standard for movies of this style. If you like this sort of thing, it will no doubt be up your alley - it is well shot and fairly seamless in its historical integration. I guess that I'm just not the target audience for this kind of movie, because I found myself drifting out of it. I had the same issue with it that I have with a lot of Natalie Portman films (a possible exception in  Black Swan ), where the union of her distinctive style with whatever her role is - in this case, a very distinctive historical figure - made it impossible to loser her inside the film. It felt, the entire time, like Natalie Portman AS Jackie Kennedy. Perhaps the inconsistency of accent was to blame, or perhaps it ...

There is absolutely no doubt that Anna Biller, who wrote and directed  The Love Witch  (and edited, and composed, and costumed, and did the set work and art direction and some of the makeup and produced and made this thing from top to bottom), did something visually breathtaking and completely singular with her labour of love. Beyond that, it becomes hard to sit on objectives: fans of film as a whole will appreciate it for its composition as a love letter to the exploitation films of the 70s, but beyond the novelty factor, I suspect that this movie will quickly wear thin on a lot of viewers. It follows the story of a new-in-town witch whose desperation to find her ideal man sees weaker men getting twisted up in her web of sex and love and spell-casting, and a trail of bodies starts to build up. The slightly stilted delivery and just parallel to reality action feels straight out of those 70s films - I draw a lot of Argento comparisons, mostly due to the use of colo...

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...

The Rezort  is…Most Dangerous Game, but people pay to hunt virus induced zombies on the island rather than still-breathing humans, and it does that plotline decently.  The acting is not going to win any awards and the exposition throughout the movie is clunky as all hell, and my god, there is a lot of it. I did, however, enjoy the ways they tried to integrate exposition to break the monotony, despite not having a lot of success. I liked some of the ideas that were touched on, but felt that the best ideas - mainly linked to HUMANS BEING THE REAL MONSTER (you may notice a theme of that being one of my favourite horror tropes) - were not given enough care and were barely explored. Zombie style movies are so ripe for exploration of ideas - look at 28 Days Later , for example  - that it just felt even more lazy than usual. If you have the ideas, at least express them. Don't just mention them and then act like you've done your job. If you want to invoke some kind of social c...

I've finally finished waging my internal war on La La Land , which so many reviewers adored and I left feeling a little lukewarm. I loved what it was going for - a “feel-good” musical tale of two flailing creative types trying to make it in LA and their love story - which purposely eschewed a lot of self-awareness and dipped unashamedly into fantasy. It was, technically and conceptually, a beautiful movie - visually satisfying (I loved how saturated all of the colours were), great music, heavily nostalgic, thematically simple - but after hearing such wonderful things, I was left wanting overall. I felt that most of the film’s issues hinged on its third act, which felt discordant and occasionally incoherent. I don’t mind a outwardly nostalgic film dipping into cliche, but I felt that often  La La Land  fell a little too far. The initial relationship between Gosling and Stone was tonally great and tooth-achingly sweet, but as conflict arose, cliche felt like it overwhelmed go...

I had next to no expectations from this quiet little black comedy on Netflix, written and directed by Zach Clark. Neither the image attached to it, nor the movie’s premise - a reformed goth and now nun-to-be returns to her hometown on her older brother’s return from deployment to Iraq - called out to me particularly, but I’m really glad I went with it.  Despite having a conceit that could veer into preachiness and dialogue that could have very easily played as Juno-era quirky for quirk’s sake, I was delighted with how well this movie played out the understated tension between family and allowed conflict to play itself out. The characters are all textured and frustrating in realistic ways, even when the commentary borders on heavy handed. I do appreciate that they seem to mostly know when to let it take a back seat. The performances really make this movie. Even with the elements that got leaned on a little to heavily at times where they were a little off balance - I had this pr...

I decided to finally watch this movie, the trailer of which gave me nightmares when I was in year six because I was a baby (come on - the whole “have you checked the children?” thing put me on edge when babysitting for years).  It’s an adaptation of the film of the same name from 1979, where a girl is babysitting and starts getting calls from the titular stranger, and things get more threatening from there. This movie is like a straight up time capsule to the early-mid 2000s and my entire childhood: there are boot cut jeans and Motorola flip phones and getting in trouble for going over your minutes. It's only been a bit over ten years and already it feels uncomfortably dated. Already bracing my face for cringing, it didn’t help that the acting was similarly grating - atrocious at times, at best it is bearable. The plot plods along pretty predictably, and I remember the big twist being spoiled by the trailer of the time (the big wham line was one I actually remembered as soon as ...

Man, what? What was this movie?  You look at the cast list for this movie and it’s like someone was playing mad libs. Nicole Kidman, who I am notoriously unable to lose in most roles, and Nicolas Cage, who is Nicolas Cage, play an unhappily married couple who are subject to a home invasion that grows increasingly more by-the-numbers as it goes. Because this is a Nicolas Cage movie, everyone is constantly trying to outdo each other in this ridiculousness stakes, and the performances are out of this world. Cam Gigandet, who you may remember from once being a part of a bad guy crew in a Twilight movie or as the STD guy from  Easy A , is clearly supposed to be playing a dramatic role but everything involving his character is unintentionally hilarious. Nic Cage is at Next level Cage for most of the movie (pun clearly intended). There are parts of it where the thieves are demanding entry to the safe, and his responses border non-sequitur in their delivery. I've watched it...

While  Project Almanac  lacks the cleanness, coherence and atmosphere of  Timecrimes ,  it at least has a bit of fun. Is it successful in at least that aspect? That’s a question I’m still unsure of the answer to. There are problems in this movie inherent to the major generic elements - not only is it a time travel movie, it’s also a found footage movie. On top of that, it’s about teenagers. From there, you should be able to work out whether or not this movie would be your cup of tea.  The first person footage is often unjustified or inconsistent (how is the video camera picking up audio of a quiet conversation metres away at a goddamn music festival?; about twenty minutes into the movie, a character finally says that from then on, they should record everything - so what was the beginning stuff?) and at times made me feel dizzy in real life. The time travel was atrocious. Even within the rules established in universe, it seemed to disregard logic at will, es...