Sara Watches Stuff

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's no secret that I consume terrible, terrible content. I don't subscribe to "guilty pleasure" philosophy. I am open and honest about all of the rubbish I subject myself to, because I think it's more important that we confront the reasons why we enjoy or dislike certain media and that we have a lot more transparency in enjoyment and meaning with problematic content. I watch  Millionaire Matchmaker , but I am constantly debating whether or not my sickening voyeurism is outweighed by what is unavoidably support of a very damaging and exploitative show. These are decisions we need to be able to make, and we need to be aware of when enjoyment is outweighed by things that are far more important, and when shaming people for enjoying things is rooted in classicism or ableism or racism, etc. I have been watching  The Bachelor  franchise for a very long time. I remember my mother and I watching that weird British season, and the off-the-wall conclusion to Jason Mesnick...

2009′s  The Stepfather  is a remake of the 1987 thriller with Terry O’Quinn (Locke-from-Lost) with both focusing on a serial killer whose MO is worming his way into the lives of single mothers before going on to the serial killing thing. It’s a real long play.  It’s pretty clean when it comes to scares and kills, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupled with the smattering of overacting and the heavy passing back and forth of the idiot ball and the whole thing stands true to the reputation of PG-13 horror.  For all of its cheesiness, it does boast a surprisingly recognisable cast (Penn Badgley and Amber Heard as highschoolers, the latter constantly in a bikini which is both sleazy and so pleasing to my little queer heart; Dylan Walsh as the serial-killing-step-father and Sela Ward from my sneaky CSI days as his current target) and the cat and mouse game is quite a fun ride, but it never truly escapes or even embraces the stupidity of decisions made or the ...

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...

Once afternoon in early 2017, my friend Mia gifted me with one of the greatest experiences of my life: my first time watching Nicolas Cage’s 1989 “horror black comedy”  Vampire’s Kiss.  This is the perfect testament to strange directorial and dramatic choices, one of the best so-bad-it’s-good flicks I’ve seen in a long time. It tells the story of Peter (Cage) whose life consists of therapy sessions, one night stands, harassing his secretary and getting aroused by bats. There are parts that feel like they are genuine attempts at humour, but others which are funny for completely different reasons - Nicolas Cage’s bizarre accent and mannerisms throughout are a great example. There is even an occasion where the same scene - literally, the exact same shot - is cut and pasted (the visible nipple covers are in the same place and everything) and passed off as another scene. Sometimes Nicolas Cage just yells! Perhaps his real ailment is a lack of ability to reasonably control...

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...

Imagine an alternate universe where I watch mostly good movies. This review is not from that universe. The Glass House  was a commercial flop and while it’s mostly blamed on the fact that it came out days after 9/11, it probably wouldn’t have fared better at any other time because it’s just generally not a great movie.  It’s about a girl whose parents die, putting her together with her brother in the care of family friends and sending them to Miami where (of course) things start to get weird with their new guardians. The problems with this movie mostly stem from the heavy reliance on cliche. When I say that, I mean that literally every aspect of this movie’s plot and dialogue and even framing is steeped in cliche. Every time something happens, you can clearly see what is going to follow: what people will respond, what actions will take place, what drama will occur. It is not necessarily bad, it just doesn’t really have anything interesting going for it. There's not any in...

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 ...

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...

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...

I’m not really one for movies about love or set during wars, but I’m very much one for movies with Gemma Arterton in them. Sadly I can report that, unlike in  Byzantium , she does not spend any of this movie in beautiful lingerie. Arterton plays a woman employed to bring a female voice to propaganda efforts in the second world war, and ends up playing a much bigger role in the broader film industry.  In spite of my mixed experiences with Lone Scherfig’s other works (for the record: winced through  One Day , to this day cannot decided how I ended up feeling about  An Education ), this might have worked out how to needle into me. It feels like one of those inspired-by-a-true-story films, even though it isn’t, but it doesn't feel dry. Instead, you have a movie about writing - hardly the most visually dynamic profession, but one I love stories about. The love story is much less my speed, but I appreciated that Arterton’s Caterin was very rarely a passive character. At...

Stylized appallingly as Thir13en Ghosts , I’d only ever heard bad things about this remake of the 1960 film (I haven’t seen that one, for what it’s worth). I went into it knowing next to nothing, other than the presence of Tony Shaloub and Matthew Lilliard - Monk and Shaggy, basically.  It’s got a pretty standard starter plot, where a grieving family inherit a house and find out that, ooooh, it’s haunted. Thankfully there’s more to it than that - the ghosts have interesting stories implied and the house itself is more of a machine than anything. Lilliard gives a typically elastic performance, and it’s loads of fun. Oh Matthew Lilliard, you distinctive, distinctively mannered man. The whole movie is actually pretty self aware and self effacing, with a great balance of darkness and light.  I’m always going to go easier on a movie that has a whole section of dialogue about hunting ghosts, to which someone else responds “goats?”. I loved the cheesy gore effects like you ...

This is going to be a very short review because I don’t have a lot to say about this movie that hasn’t already been said: it’s fantastic and uplifting and I’m so glad I waited to finally see it in the cinema. Telling the story of actual real life NASA heroes Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn who fought stakes much higher than some weird movie villain, let’s be real. We’re talking institutionalized racism and sexism and I guess Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory is kind of irritating (and he’s playing a dialled down version of his Big Bang Theory character, I promise). Director Theodore Melfi never feels like he’s over-manipulating the audience and the story doesn’t feel like a disservice to the real people involved, and it was less white saviour-y than I have come to fear. Sadly, there is definitely an element of it,  especially with the character of Johnson’s white boss, whose actions are fictionalized  - I understand the addition of drama, and the visual/em...

Having never had a strong nostalgic connection to the 1991 movie (I was a Little Mermaid girl), I wasn’t getting my hopes up for the live action adaptation.  I don’t need to tell you the story - beauty’s on the inside, guys - but it did its job and it did it successfully. It’s a faithful adaptation, but thankfully it makes small changes: I appreciated that Belle and the Beast had more footing as equals and that Belle was a more active character. There was a lot of talk around added touches with characters like Le Fou whose storyline as a gay character is not limited to subtext. I'm uncertain of how I feel with regards to that specific change - it felt a little overly played for comedy in a way I was a little uncomfortable with. In addition, the film is absolutely gorgeous. The CGI is generally beautifully integrated (with the exception of one bath scene that totally broke my immersion), the performances are excellent (Luke Evans’ Gaston was far and away my favourite; I could l...

The original Spanish title of this movie is  Los Cronocrímenes, so it will not shock you to know that this is a Spanish film about time travel! It's also directed by Nacho Vigalondo, whose 2017 movie Colossal is one I will not shut up about. Hector sees a woman undressing in the woods, goes after her, gets attacked and then takes refuge in a time machine. If you've watched any amount of movies concerning time travel, you’ll be able to see where that’s heading. Thankfully it doesn’t attempt to unravel too much philosophy in the way that time travel movies can, and it doesn’t get wrapped up in itself - it goes for a route that allows you to enjoy it without frustration, contrary to movies like  Looper  (which notably made me want to throw things afterwards). While it doesn’t break any new ground, it does do a good job with the framework that exists. The build starts slow but the strengths lie in the way new layers are revealed to the same story. The atmosphere is dist...

I can count the number of Australian horror films that I’ve personally really enjoyed on my fingers (um... The Loved Ones ... The Babadook... I'm sure there are others) so as soon as this started rolling and I heard the accents and recognised one of the actors from old iselect adverts, I’ll admit that my hopes weren’t high. In a twist more shocking than anything in the movie itself, I had a good time with  Scare Campaign ! It follows the cast and crew of a hidden camera "pranked ya!" style scare show, who need to up their game to keep up with the torture porn going viral through the deep web. The message is pretty clear - the media isn’t any sicker than the shit kids come up with on their own - and has been done, but there’s a lightheartedness and freshness in how it plays. They aren’t afraid of twists and turns, and rarely in a way that feels convoluted - it works with their grand narrative. The acting is pretty uniformly decent, from the sleazy guy at the helm to the...

I think anyone contemplating watching this movie should go in with the knowledge that if you struggle dealing with second hand embarrassment or any level of cringe comedy, you are going to have trouble .  I genuinely had to take a few breaks from watching this movie.  Hailee Steinfeld is actually believable as a weird kid teenager balancing the complexities of mental health, worsened after the loss of her father, with the minefield of adolescence and high school social warfare. Due to how intensely unlikeable teenagers are, these coming of age movies toe a tricky line, but thankfully the characters a given enough depth that their horribleness feels real and relateable and painful. Like “ oh god, I did something like that, didn’t I?”  painful. I was having a lot of really uncomfortable flashbacks that I'd rather leave alone. The supporting cast varied wildly in successfulness - the standout was absolutely Hayden Szeto as a nerdy clearly-telegraphed-love-interest ...

Apparently  Hocus Pocus  is like…a big thing for people in my generation? I hadn’t seen it before, corrected by my friends on a decidedly eclectic movie night.  It’s - look, it’s something else. I think most of the love for it depends on a great deal of nostalgia, which was obviously absent from my viewing - I understood it, but I didn’t have childhood ties to it. It’s extraordinarily campy, which is fun, and Sarah Jessica Parker has truly never reached the same heights as she did in this. Bette Midler heaves the movie on her shoulders and gives it a heightened surreality that it needed to keep it from just veering into ridiculous unhinged levels beyond enjoyability. Any movie that relies this much on child acting is going to be hit and miss, though, and the teenagers are pretty rough to watch as they attempt to save the town from three returned-from-the-”dead” witches. There’s a younger sister character whose actress outdoes everyone else and is very nearly the highli...

Beyond the Gates  is pretty self-explanatory: it’s quasi-horror  Jumanji  but with VCR board games instead of, you know, Jumanji. Two estranged brothers, blah blah blah, missing father, blah blah, find this game in dad’s office and decide to play it, blah, things get weird. Even if you’ve never heard of this movie, you could write the plot of it right now and at least hit 60% of the marks. It’s not a bad movie if you switch your brain off: it’s got an awesome synth heavy 80s soundtrack (clearly capitalising on the popularity of nostalgia media like  Stranger Things  and  It Follows ), and it’s pretty heavily derivative visually as well, but not in a way that is unsatisfactory. And honestly, everyone loved  Jumanji . Heck, I even watched  Zathura  twice as a kid on two separate occasions with different people in two separate dark closets. It’s hard to fuck it up. And director Jackson Stewart didn’t fuck it up! I just…I don’t know that he...

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...

I had fun with this little horror movie. A father son coroner and med tech duo - played by Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch, both great in their respective roles - perform the autopsy on an unidentified female, unable to find the cause of death as things get stranger and stranger.  It’s a simple idea, but it’s explored to great impact, even as a fairly straightforward film with all the usual horror techniques out to play. The jump scares are there, but they’re telegraphed well, and it doesn’t feel like it’s falling over itself to be twisty. In fact, the final reveal feels pretty organic and well signposted but still packs a punch.  At times I wish it were better lit - the older I get, the more I whinge about that - and as a big sucker for medical gore, I wish more of the inherent autopsy horror had remained the focus rather than the point at which the movie forked off into an attempt at escape, even though that was a more realistic character approach. Some of the exposition rea...

I’m always wary of horror anthologies and they’re notoriously difficult to review because you have to think of them as the sum of their parts. Why am I bothering with this year’s  XX  then, especially writing about it? Not only is it newly released on Netflix in Australia as I'm transferring these reviews over to this blog, it also falls squarely into my wheelhouse. Let’s do some feminist horror dissection! If the name or the surrounding buzz in the usual feminist internet hotspots hadn’t clued you in, every short in XX is directed by women and theoretically based around ideas in horror linked to femininity and the female experience. It manages to do this, thankfully, while retaining near-consistent quality.  My hopes were not high. I always loudly advocate for more prominent female voices in horror, and this felt like too good a concept to be well executed. I've watched V/H/S descend into chaos and sat through the goddamn mess that was ABCs of Death . There are lul...

Sometimes it’s enough for a movie to be quiet, funny in bits, and nicely made. That sounds like a low bar for praise, but honestly I’ve been watching a lot of Nic Cage movies and this was exactly what I needed as a remedy.  The movie follows Ruth (Melany Lynskey), a nurse whose house is robbed, causing her to take stock and redirect her life and find a literal partner in crime (Elijah Wood). There are so many times when this movie had the potential to be great. It got so close - there were times when it was really, really good - but then it would just slightly miss, leaving that little bit of wasted potential and me feeling frustrated. Melanie Lynskey is excellent in the main role. After seeing her in  XX , I’m keen to see more of her work in darker films. She and Elijah Wood play really well off of each other, and their strange chemistry really works in a movie with such a distinctively odd atmosphere. It does very much reek of “netflix original” - the cinematograp...

National Treasure  is a national treasure. Like all Nic Cage movies, though, it’s off-the-charts weird. Would you expect anything less? On a scale of really bad to really good Nicolas Cage fare, this is pretty good stuff.  It’s cheesy as all hell, as you would expect from the damn movie where a guy decides to steal the Declaration of Independence. Still, it's coherent and there’s no shitty accent and even though the characters act on bizarre whims and strange logic, it is watchable without actually being a case of agonisingly-awful-watch-through-your-fingers watchable.  While it's plodding along with standard adventure movie tropes, it's doing so in style. Puzzles are solved in ridiculous fashion, people proceed from A to B via J, and it’s wonderful. Nicolas Cage, in his slight elevation from reality, really works in his role! That feels like praise I rarely get to apply. He has absolutely no romantic chemistry with the historian played by Diane Krueger, sure. Still,...

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,...

You know when a movie claims to be based on true stories and you can’t help rolling your eyes? That’s  Deliver Us From Evil .  Bar some effective spooky imagery, the movie itself is very average. A cop (Eric Bana) uncovers a case that quickly reveals itself to be centred around possession and otherworldly interference, and it becomes an obsession.  It’s slow paced and not in a way that feels intentional; it’s a horror movie bottled in a crime drama, and as such it can't quite figure out whether to pace itself over episodes or to keep the action up. The lighting suffers a similar condition, where the whole thing is lit in the same way as those “gritty” tv shows that really need to ease up on the blue tint and maybe turn on a lamp or two. The performances are fine, mostly - Eric Bana carries the whole damn movie, and you need it in contrast to people like the Jesuit priest who is…cringe-worthy. It’s so close to nailing the tone - it could go full cop drama or full...

Most of what there is to say about  Con Air  has already been said by the countless reviewers: it is inexplicably conceived and bizarrely performed. It was 1997, the same year as Face/Off , and it was right at the end of the period of time Nicolas Cage could be taken seriously as an actor. This movie is aware that it exists as a ridiculous action movie, but the question as to whether or not Nicolas Cage was in on the joke is something else altogether. His accent is truly baffling and more frustratingly, inconsistent. He’s an “ex-con” (his crime very easily an argument of self defense, but sure) on an air travel prisoner transfer, and the other criminals take over the plane. Hi-jinks occur of both comedic and deadly varieties. The humour is ridiculous, presumably unintentional at times, and the plot is absolutely absurd. The exposition is extraordinarily clunky and lumped up all together in giant blocks. I rolled my eyes more times than I could count. There are all of thes...