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 ...

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 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...