Sara Watches Stuff

I Saw Atomic Blonde And All I Got Was This Overwhelming Urge To Write and Inconclusive Review, but on a t-shirt or something. The internet has not been able to shut up about Charlize Theron and Atomic Blonde for months. It's from David Leitch one of the directors of critical darling John Wick - full disclosure, I've not seen it, for lazy reasons I'll explain later - and is based on a series of graphic novels called The Coldest City , and by all accounts both of those things are extremely obvious in the movie. It's got that graphic novel feel to it, ultra slick and stylised with extreme attention to visual detail and use of colour. Charlize Theron plays Lorraine Broughton, a spy in 1989 Germany, in her pursuit to retrieve a list of intelligence information.  Most obviously, it's an attempt to subvert the tropes of the male dominated spy genre. Lorraine is every bit as suave and mysterious and her counterparts, and far better dressed. She tears through opponents i...

It's hard to talk about movies that you end up just sort of watching to kill some time, but this one is a favourite of a close friend so it felt like something I really needed to get to. It's a pretty great exercise in watching pre-"political correctness gone mad" world (if I ever use that phrase in earnest, it's an invasion of the body snatchers situation) movies because you don't have to constant excuse it - "It was a different time", "It was okay to say that then". The First Wives Club stands pretty strong in 2017 as a story of the ins and outs of female bonding and empowerment and finding balance. It's not without flaw, but I didn't feel grimy watching it in the way I do when I watch a lot of 90s movies casually fling around slurs. The cast of the movie is naturally its biggest drawcard: even the minor rolls are recognisable faces, with the whole plot kicking off as Stockard Channing - the erstwhile Rizzo - commits suicide, t...

The “strange” part of the name really says something about this movie. I remember very little of it, other than the overwhelming sense of discomfort I felt while watching it. Strangerland tells the story of a couple in a small Australian town whose children go missing. This is a drama wearing that wants to get psychological, so it is naturally not that simple. Nicole Kidman, an actress who is often criticized for being difficult to lose in a role, was pretty the highlight of this movie. It was captivating to watch her character come apart at the seams as the movie went on. The kids were…not horrible, which is nice for child actors, and the characters all felt pretty broken and destructive. That aspect really worked. The other thing that worked spectacularly was the small-town Australia evocation and imagery. The contrast of desert vastness with the claustrophobia and insulation of small towns was done really well. Some of the cinematography was breathtaking, particularly...

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...

With that whole niche subgenre that has evolved from Dinner Party Thrillers having often been to my tastes - think  Coherence ,  The Gift ,  The Invitation  as modern iterations -  I’d had this David Hyde Pierce vehicle recommended to me a bunch. This is definitely a more charismatic take with a home invasion set up - our dinner party guest is a career criminal taking refuge in Niles-From-Frasier’s house, but of course the night does not go as intended.  It’s largely a piece that just lets the character interactions speak for themselves, which I really appreciated. It does become a little unhinged as it races to the finish line, and I could have done without the overreliance on flashbacks, which I didn’t feel clarified the story. You’ve also got to accept that it’s going to try to get twisty on you, and if you’ve watched enough of these kinds of movies, you’re not going to be surprised by anything that happens. The supporting cast do well and Hyde Pierce...

When Julia Ducournau's Raw   was first released, it gathered a lot of hype thanks to its reputation in regards visceral imagery and pretty confronting cannibalism story. I was worried that I would watch it and be let down, because reviews seemed generally positive and I'm always here for horror tinged plots driven by female directors and female protagonists. On finally watching Raw , I can tell you that it is barely a horror movie and barely a cannibalism movie at all: it is a thinly veiled allegory for burgeoning sexuality alongside themes of sisterhood and coming of age, all wrapped in the skin of cannibal tropes past. I loved it.  The story of Raw is not anything revolutionary. Someone (in this case, a first year vegetarian veterinary student named Justine played by Garance Marillier) gets forced to eat meat, and develops a taste for human flesh. There is nothing subtle in the way it is told - Justine's cravings for meat evoke a sexual awakening and echo her transfo...

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...