Sara Watches Stuff

The cinema. I love it! It's the one time I'll risk eating popcorn and the subsequent agony I'll most likely endure. I love getting comfy in an oversized seat that countless children have undoubtedly wet themselves in while the lights go down around me; hearing the music swell from all angles and being swallowed up by the big screen. I'm no cinema snob, though. I've had some of good movie experiences on big screens in the park ( Ferris Bueller's Day Off  for the very first time) with bats overhead, or at makeshift drive-ins on old race courses (a Grease singalong). I'll even have a good movie watch with a streaming service, watching Ghost Ship  for the twenty third time on the living room television or falling asleep the the fourteenth season of CSI on my phone so that I dream about Ted Danson.  For a long time, I thought that the worst way to watch a movie was on a plane. Small screen, strange edits to sanitise content, and you're almost always uncom...

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...

Historically, I do not enjoy romantic comedies. I am a horror buff, I love thrillers, I enjoy action comedies and cars exploding, I can tell you every detail of every Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen travel movie, but as soon as romance gets in there on a serious level I tend to stop enjoying things. I'm a bitter weirdo who hates love! You have to throw in something campy for me to get on board, or at least make it queer. All that considered, I don't think anyone would be surprised that I deeply enjoyed  Crazy Rich Asians. Like Get Out and Girls Trip and Moonlight  and a whole host of other movies, it didn't matter at all whether or not I loved Crazy Rich Asians , because it is not about me. Not every movie needs to be about me. There were a lot of things in this movie that were not for me, and I loved that. The movie is based on Kevin Kwan's book of the same name, and it follows the story of an economics professor named Rachel (Constance Wu, who is outstanding) whose b...

When a movie is fairly universally regarded as terrifying, I become fixated on it. My fascination with horror as a genre has really hardened me to the notion of "scary", but Hereditary  was getting rave reviews and being called scary by all the people whose opinions result in critically acclaimed horror. I had to put on my cynical boots - a lot of these people also loved The VVitch , which I found very hit and miss, and the movie comes from the same producers. Still, my yearning to get to the bottom of what people consider to be a properly scary movie in the current day found an acceptable target.  With Hereditary , it's easy to see why people were so enraptured. It's a thrilling experience. For a relatively new filmmaker on the mainstream scene, Ari Aster has created a very tightly directed and composed movie. It follows a family after the death of Toni Collette's character's mother, through varying places of grief and understanding of the complexities...

Lots of people have written reviews for Ava Duvernay's adaptation of Madaline L'Engle's book A Wrinkle in Time , and look, it hasn't been pretty. It's sitting on a Rotten Tomatoes 40%, and it's tangled up in grossness. Disregard any review that whinges about people who only like this movie for representation, or that the diversity in this movie is forced, because both of those things are every bit as a bogus as the make believe world that this movie takes place in. The people making those statements are often the same people who'll rush to say that a review should be about the movie and the movie alone, and it's rare that I'll agree with that, because meaning and intent are deeply entwined with what you watch. It can't be overstated that A Wrinkle in Time is every bit a children's movie. There can be movies for children which play well for all ages, and while I do feel that this has some broader appeal, it is not a movie in which you will f...

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...

Inevitably, we come to the time of year where the big awards are being handed out and the Oscars are upon us and it turns out I have not seen any critically acclaimed movies this year. Well, except Get Out , which I am so happy to see getting the recognition it deserves. There's a whole rant brewing about social commentary being dismissed by horror fans (because scariness is all that matters) and not being taken seriously by the broader community (because it's just a scary movie) that totally disregards the excellent direction and writing and overall work in a movie like that. My other favourites from the year were a little left of centre: Raw  deserved something for Foreign Language but it was one of the more visceral horror films around and  Colossal  was technically screened at TIFF 2016 and it was pretty weird. I do tend to make it a mission to see films with lots of buzz, because I want to be educated before I make any sweeping statements on them. While trailers ...