Sara Watches Stuff

While we're looking at movies about neighbours! A year on from watching this movie and I can barely tell you anything about it. It was the kind of movie that left me completely cold. Not the good kind of cold - that’s a special thing, reserved for movies that are horrible to you like  Funny Games  - but rather unmoved, and like the whole thing hadn’t really done much. It’s a strangely passive movie where you watch people watching - two insufferable teenagers decide to do an experiment convincing their neighbour he is being haunted. A story gets told, but none of the characters change or grow or do much of anything.The positives come from the integration of found footage without it being a wholly found footage film - it put you in the front row without feeling cheap or unclear - and generally decent performances. Sadly, those mean less when the cast are working with a story that needs a lot more fleshing out. I suspect there was a lot more that they wanted to do with the...

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...

Or “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising″, as it apparently launched abroad.  Continuing my Zac Efron Garbage Reviews. Thankfully Neighbours 2 does their light, low-thought thing without always caving to the lowest common denominator. It lands some solid jokes as well as some ridiculously silly ones, and that’s totally fine, because it’s not also being bland and aggressively horrible the whole time. Female characters are allowed to be gross, but they’re also allowed to be funny and smart and kind of awful and it’s all mostly balanced out. The cast were great together and with a couple of exceptions it was good performances all round (I thought Chloe Grace Moretz was the weak link, which was rough with her in the main role). I don’t think it talked too far down at young women either, which is a risk with the subject matter. It basically follows a new sorority next door to the couple from the last movie - the too-good-for-this Rose Byrne and the exactly-right-for-this Seth Rogen - and the...

This movie had all the hallmarks of a movie I would enjoy watching on a plane, by which I mean that Zac Efron is in it. Sadly, unlike most of the Fun Garbage I’ve watched recently (I'll post another Zac Efron Fun Garbage review soon), this movie just kind of made me angry.  It felt like way someone had an idea for a movie - two man-children try getting respectable wedding dates by way of national advertising, and they turn out to be just as terrible - but whoever had that idea forgot to flesh any of it out or plan any jokes. It had maybe a couple of moments I giggled at? I'm being generous. There’s a canonically, openly bisexual character (I’m not  totally  into bisexuality being automatically conflated with promiscuity thing but baby steps)! I didn’t think the performances were great - disappointingly, even normally decent actors felt sluggish - and overall, I found the whole movie quite irritating and immature. Adam Devine was at peak obnoxiousness and very few peopl...

I never wrote a review for Friend Request when it released in Europe in 2016, mostly because it was one of the most thoroughly underwhelming, by-the-numbers, ill-produced pieces of horror garbage I'd watched in a while. It wasn't the kind of bad that was fun to write about: it was just an indistinct blob of horror on a screen.  Pre-Halloween seems to be the prime time for those indistinct blobs of horror that the film industry has been saving away. Got a movie saved up that wrapped filming in 2014 and released in Europe in 2016 but hasn't technically had its money-making potential squeezed out of it? Go for it. The US release reminded me that I should probably get some thoughts written down, however brief and aggravated. I can't tell you much about the plot of Friend Request because I remember watching it and having all of the details dissolve from my mind almost immediately. It's a fitting review to follow the conceptually bloated and allegorically confused...

After a brief flirtation with serious pop cultural critique, I'm back to reviewing the horror movie rubbish that no one else has seen (and for good reason). What better way to settle into that niche than to watch one of the many hundreds of Saw copycats on the market? It's my own personal white noise. Saw itself is one of the most problematic and ideologically iffy film franchises around with one of the best first movies, and I'm unapologetically hyped for the next movie to come out. The ripoffs, however, are...something.  In my time watching blatant Saw ripoffs, I have seen some utter garbage. Even I, the most dedicated terrible movie watcher, could not sit through the monotony and bad acting of 2011's Vile . I struggled through 2006 Thai thriller 13 Beloved , even when it made me near gag, or 2014's Circle , even though I nearly fell asleep . Over time, I've enjoyed the occasional movie in this specific set up: I didn't mind the divisive Would You Ra...

If no man ever pushes any woman’s hair behind her ear in a movie ever again, it will still have happened too much in the cinematic canon. That, of course, is hardly the main point of the newest movie in the  Harry Potter  universe, but it’s a very specific kind of nonsense that shouldn’t also exist in fantasy universes. Abolish it. Outlaw it. Off topic! I never thought I would have such low expectations or minimal enthusiasm for a movie related to  Harry Potter , having been a part of the original wave of enthusiasts and Big Ol’ Nerds. A lot of factors contributed to that: I have to admit to being wary of any way supporting the continuing of Johnny Depp’s acting career, for one. Indeed, when it came to his cameo, it did feel like a moment that was supposed to result in “hey, it’s that guy!” but instead resulted in “oh god, it’s…that guy”. Then there’s my growing distance from the franchise and my disillusionment with the heavy handedness of canon overruling it - not to...

Disclaimer:  It's going to be a long one. This review will not contain explicit spoilers but will be discussing broader thematic elements that may veer into spoiler territory for movie purists. I'm also going to be discussing the treatment of women in the film, because it was  salient to me as a woman watching the movie and I imagine it is something that a lot of people might be impacted by.  And to contrast pretty much every other review of this movie, I'm not going to talk about any of the Rosemary's Baby influence here. There's nothing important enough about it to the movie to get me to talk about Actual Rapist Roman Polanski. A lot of people will tell you that Darren Aronofsky's latest film, mother! , is psychologically stimulating and exhilarating and will keep you guessing. You can definitely read this surreal thriller in a few different ways, but here's the way I read it: as an interesting but ultimately self aggrandizing and heavy handed clusterf...

Even after watched this movie, I find it hard to believe that it is a movie that managed to get released in 2017. If you like your horror generic and driven by two sentence horror stories from old reddit threads  and you're really into Nazi plotlines, I guess, then this is a hoot. The problem is that this is a whole movie built around one scary shot - a scary shot that has been explored before, and that is shown in the trailer - and it spends the rest of the run time not knowing what to do with itself. Nearly half an hour of this movie from the beginning set up a backstory, wherein an overprotective father (did I mention he's a NAZI?) tries too hard to keep his daughter sheltered. It is the kind of thing that overexplains and leaves no ambiguity for the audience, so that when the modern day characters are undergoing spooky happenings, we all immediately know about the Nazis and the daughter and the history that the characters are exploring. Speaking of characters, it's ge...