Sara Watches Stuff

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 watched and enjoyed David F. Sandberg’s  short film of the same name  a while back, so I was cautiously optimistic about the feature length piece.  The concept alone implies the jump scares - there’s something haunting a family and it can only move in the dark - so if that’s not your thing, this movie won’t work for you. For me, it was alright. The reliance on jump scares was spaced out enough that it didn’t feel excessive, but it did become a predictable vehicle for scares and lost the efficacy that it had in the short. Teresa Palmer barely held the movie together, but the story did feel like a looser attempt to keep a cool idea going by stringing together tropes and horror movie cliches. The longer it went on, the weaker it felt. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s a fun horror movie with all of the requisite themes (the unseen, familial bonds, supernatural vs.skepticism, mental instability). It takes a few shortcuts to make the points it wants to make, but it does ...