Sara Watches Stuff

Needle is an Australian horror movie inexplicably set in America, wherein half of the characters have terrible fake American accents and the other half are just explained away as Australian expats or exchange students. It’s fine, guys. You can actually set a movie in Australia. It’s really important that it’s set in America, for some reason.  I mean, it’s probably more important that I tell you what this movie’s plot is: fake-American college boy inherits a wacky mysterious machine from his father, which ends up getting stolen and is subsequently used to torture everyone he cares about. Say, a slasher film if Michael Myers was never actually there and just killed everyone with voodoo dolls.  Nothing new or unique, but it does offer up some cool potential - the second kill (or third, if you include the opening sequence) is some great, over the top splatter fare and was probably my favourite sequence in the movie, if I’m honest. Other than that, and the whole discussion I’m...

With that whole niche subgenre that has evolved from Dinner Party Thrillers having often been to my tastes - think  Coherence ,  The Gift ,  The Invitation  as modern iterations -  I’d had this David Hyde Pierce vehicle recommended to me a bunch. This is definitely a more charismatic take with a home invasion set up - our dinner party guest is a career criminal taking refuge in Niles-From-Frasier’s house, but of course the night does not go as intended.  It’s largely a piece that just lets the character interactions speak for themselves, which I really appreciated. It does become a little unhinged as it races to the finish line, and I could have done without the overreliance on flashbacks, which I didn’t feel clarified the story. You’ve also got to accept that it’s going to try to get twisty on you, and if you’ve watched enough of these kinds of movies, you’re not going to be surprised by anything that happens. The supporting cast do well and Hyde Pierce...

Taika Waititi is far and away one of my favourite directors working today. He has me contemplating watching a Thor movie, which I never thought would happen. I don't think their are many people working in film with the same grasp of comic direction that he just has. Boy is one of his earlier works , an evolved version of his short film Two Cars, One Night . It's easy to see Waititi's evolution as a filmmaker when you watch this against one of his newer works, but it still has that innate balance of dark and light that seems near effortless. It's got a bit of roughness around the edges that did make this a little bit less of an unabashed joy than What We Do In The Shadows .  That's not to say that this isn’t every bit as much refreshing, simplistic fun as the others - it’s easy to see the spiritual roots of  Hunt for the Wilderpeople  in this - but little things that might have niggled are a little more evident in this, with its slower pacing and scaled down s...