Sara Watches Stuff

On a superficial, deeply gay level, the reason I watched Byzantium is that Gemma Arterton is out of this world gorgeous and she spends chunk of this movie wearing lingerie and killing people (not necessarily at the same time).  The movie itself is a softer, quieter take on the traditional vampire story. Two vampire sisters tackle the world together, attempting to remain undiscovered. Neil Jordan, who directed it, also adapted Interview with a Vampire and while I haven’t seen that one, I’ve heard they share a lot of the same DNA. It’s beautifully shot, and the balance between period segments and the modern day is nicely done so that it isn’t overwhelmingly a period drama. All that said, there are times when it feels overwhelmingly like something else: a teenage melodrama. It’s definitely not a byproduct of the story’s feminine energy, but rather of how the material is handled - centuries old characters act, at times, like fifteen year olds and their views of romance ar...

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 ...

I get recommended a lot of terrible, terrible horror movies, so I've learned to take any recommendations from the internet with a grain of salt. I had absolutely no idea what to expect from the relatively small film, Spring . It was directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead, and while I own Resolution on DVD, I've never actually watched it? How did it get there? Is it any good? I should probably watch Resolution , right? I should definitely watch Resolution , because if Spring is any proof of what Benson and Moorhead can do together, they're a great team. I was actually shocked that this was recommended to me on horror forums, because it's such a non-horror movie. I'd actually call Spring a romance first a foremost, with monster movie leanings. Think Colossal , but less sophisticated and about love instead of people systemically destroying each other , and really the only similarity is the monster thing. Apparently I just like monster movies that are di...

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...

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...

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...

I feel like I speak a lot about psychological thrillers set at dinner parties. It’s easy to see why they're so popular, and I've written about before - they're an easy and effective set up, with minimal exposition, that throws our characters into a situation together and allows for the weird shit to go down. In  Coherence,  a comet is passing overhead, and weird shit goes down. It’s hard to talk thoroughly about this movie without going into spoiler territory, but I’d say that if you’re a fan of when movies get a little pseudo-science and quasi-cerebral, you'll probably get into Coherence . I'm trying to draw comparisons: the most obvious comparison is to another recent dinner party thriller, The Invitation , which I haven't posted my review for yet. It also very strongly evoked the movie Triangle for me, which you'll probably like if you get into this one or vice versa. It's like a time travel movie for people who don't want to watch a time trave...

If you haven't watched Ghost Ship , it might be a surprise when I tell you that Ghost Ship is a surprisingly good Ghosts-on-a-Boat movie. The opening scene of Ghost Ship is one of my favourite opening horror scenes of all time, and there's a reason it's so deeply beloved online. Turns out there's more to the movie than that! It came as a surprise to me when I first watched Ghost Ship  that a movie called Ghost Ship  could strike the near-perfect balance between being ridiculous and unnerving. From that spectacular opening scene to the next-level nonsensical murder madness is splashed throughout the film in a way that is hard not to enjoy. There were times when I found myself feeling genuinely jumpy because the atmosphere was so eerie. Put a murder mystery on a boat and stick in some ghosts and a whodunnit element and I'm all in, all the way. The cast also knocked it out of the park - Julianna Margulies was great, and it’s always nice seeing Emily Browning in th...

Ever wanted to peek back in time and glance at what life was like in the late 00s? You might think "Hey, I'll watch Picture This starring Ashley Tisdale!" As someone who vividly remembers 2009 in spite of desperate attempts to repress it, I can conclusively say that this is not what life was like in the late 00s. This movie is garbage. The only explanation I can think of for this movie is that it takes place in an alternate universe. Nothing makes sense. It’s high school, but it’s a weird version of high school where Ashley Tisdale is the Total Loser (she wears glasses! Only nerdy losers wear glasses!) and popularity is defined by wealth. Sure, except Ashley Tisdale’s Mandy is supposed to be on the outs and her house is comically large and her father showers her in expensive gifts? There are so many dark things hinted at that get zero explanation: a side character’s mother has a severe drinking problem, there is casual witchcraft, lost children, and the tiny fact that ...

Everything in me wanted to outright love this movie, and it kept slipping just through my fingers. Sadly, it's more than six months on, and I can remember next to nothing about it. I remember enjoying Jermaine Clement! That's no shock. Here's what I wrote initially: I have nothing but good will for Jemaine Clement, who is tremendously charismatic and manages to play a deeply flawed character while keeping you endeared. Really, the performances are never a problem - from core to supporting actors, everyone does great work with the material.  The problem is with some of that material. The story itself, of a man trying to course correct a year after his relationship breaks up while balancing new entanglements and custody arrangements over his children, is usually something that would have me rolling my eyes. It’s very simple and isn’t attempting to reinvent the wheel, but it’s incredibly comforting how messy and awful the characters and their situations are.  Unfortunat...

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...