Sandra Harris Writes

  LOVE ON THE BOX. BY SANDRA HARRIS. Oh. My. God. I'm down a right rabbit hole now and no mistake. And, this time, it's not an Internet rabbit hole but a Netflix one. Let me explain. I watched Love Island UK as usual this summer, as I have done for the last few years. This summer in particular, it helped take my mind off the unbearable heat that seemed to go on forever. I was genuinely scared at one point that it was never going to rain again; here in Ireland, two months without rain is unthinkable and has literally never happened before. If it happens again, and keeps happening, I don't see how we all can survive it. I'm not even a climate alarmist, by the way, truly I'm not. It's just you've no idea how much Ireland and rain go together, like bacon and eggs, like Cagney & Lacey, like spice-bag and a few cans of Guinness. To have two months without rain as an Irish person was like living through the end of days. Anyway, where was I? O...

  HOT GIRLS WANTED: TURNED ON. (2017) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY SERIES. PRODUCED BY JILL BAUER, RONNA GRADUS AND RASHIDA JONES. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. I literally couldn't wait to sit down and write this review, even though I'm nearly a decade late to the party and the show has been on Netflix for several years. This documentary series is a follow-up to the 2015 documentary film, Hot Girls Wanted, in which several young girls/women are interviewed about their lives as amateur porn actresses. They all live in a grotty bungalow with twenty-three-year-old Riley Reynolds, a porn agent, in North Miami Beach. Yes, they go to casting calls and shoot amateur porn movies, but there's an awful lot of sitting around bored on their phones in Riley's house and overall the life isn't as glamorous as it sounds. Riley, though not abusive, reminds me of nothing so much as a douche-baggy pimp, and his words (paraphrased by me as I remember them) live rent-free in my head: '...

  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA!  BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library. It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen. I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmark...

ADOLESCENCE. (2025) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY JACK THORNE AND STEPHEN GRAHAM. DIRECTED BY PHILIP BARANTINI. STARRING STEPHEN GRAHAM, OWEN COOPER, CHRISTINE TREMARCO, ERIN DOHERTY, ASHLEY WALTERS AND FAYE MARSAY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s about six in the morning and a little housing estate somewhere in England is still slumbering peacefully. Suddenly, a convoy of police cars and vans pull up outside one of the houses. A cohort of masked, heavily armed men dressed in black and toting huge guns emerge from one of the vans and start to break down the front door with a battering ram. The family of four inside are terrified as they are shouted at to stay still or get on the floor. Upstairs, a thirteen-year-old boy who looks much younger is revealed as the reason for this early morning raid. He’s told he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder, though he’s not told of whom and strangely, no-one in his family thinks to ask. It’s a shocking opening to a well-plotted and well-act...

NOVEMBER BLUES... AND BROWNS, REDS AND ORANGES TOO… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I have the November Blues. It happens every year at the same time. Yes, November, lol. I know some people who love November because they’re looking forward to Christmas so much, but, to me, November is kind of a ‘meh’ month. I’m usually tired, for one thing, after all the effort I put into making Halloween the best time of the year. I love September and October, with the brown and red and orange foliage and falling leaves and glorious early sunsets. Also, there are the films…! HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN 3, THE THING, THE FOG, THE SHINING, THE CHANGELING, THE HAUNTING, PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, these are all on my regular Halloween go-to list and they literally just improve with age. I never get tired of watching these classics by terrific directors such as John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. Then there’s the best film Hammer never made, the superb horror comedy CARRY ON SCREAMING , with the gorgeousl...

  ALBA. (2021) BASED ON THE TURKISH DRAMA SERIES, FATMAGUL’UN SUCU NE? DIRECTED BY PABLO GUERRERO, CARLOTA MARTINEZ-PEREDA AND HUMBERTO MIRO. STARRING ELENA RIVERA, ERIC MASIP, CATERINA MENGS, ADRIANA OZORES, ALVARO RICO, POL HERMOSO, JASON FERNANDEZ, FRANKY MARTIN, CANDELA CRUZ AND ANTONIO GIL. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘Our power derives from denying theirs.’ There are almost too many twists and turns in this Spanish psychological drama-thriller, and it could have done without maybe three of its thirteen fifty-minute episodes, but I still really enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of the English drama series LIAR , which in turn was based on the Spanish drama series LIES AND DECEIT , as drug-rape is the main topic in all three Netflix shows. The thing I’ve noticed with very long, multi-episode series is that they run out of steam a wee bit before the end and as a result get twistier and turnier until some of the twists are, frankly, incomprehensible. Such is the case ...

  WHEN THEY SEE US. (2019) A NETFLIX TRUE CRIME DRAMA SERIES WRITTEN, CREATED AND DIRECTED BY AVA DUVERNAY. STARRING FELICITY HUFFMAN, VERA FARMIGA, FAMKE JANNSEN AND JOHN LEGUIZAMO. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This is a superb four-part true crime/drama mini-series, but it’s the most harrowing thing I’ve ever seen on Netflix, and all the more harrowing for its all being true, and the fact that the stuff that happens to the young boys in it all actually happened. And, if it’s harrowing to watch, how much worse must it be to have actually lived through all this horrible stuff. Let me tell you the story. On the night of April 19 th , 1989 (can you remember where you were and what you were doing in April of that year, just to put the timeframe into context?), a young white woman, an investment banker called Patricia Meili, went for a run late in the evening in New York’s famous Central Park. Somewhere along the way, she was accosted, raped, beaten severely and left for dead in ...

  THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY. (2016) BASED ON JEFFREY TOOBIN’S 1997 BOOK, THE RUN OF HIS LIFE: THE PEOPLE VS. OJ SIMPSON. STARRING CUBA GOODING JR., DAVID SCHWIMMER, JOHN TRAVOLTA, NATHAN LANE, SARAH PAULSON, STERLING K. BROWN, KENNETH CHOI AND COURTNEY B. VANCE. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I absolutely loved this gripping ten-episode series, only on Netflix until February 28 th , 2022, which forms the first season of true crime anthology series, AMERICAN CRIME STORY. The writing is brilliant, the acting top-notch and the pacing wonderful. The series is based on the real-life murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by acclaimed NFL (football) player and sometimes-actor, Orenthal James Simpson, better known to the public as OJ ‘The Juice’ Simpson. OJ was Nicole’s ex-husband, with whom he had two children, Sydney and Justin, and Ronald Goldman was Nicole's then boyfriend. After a widely televised low-speed car chase through Los Angeles (‘The J...