Simon's Movie Reviews

  Some movies are best watched sober while others might best be enjoyed with a liberal dose of alcohol or possibly hallucinogens. With David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) I strongly suspect drugs might give the viewers a panic attack because they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a hallucination or the actual movie. I watched it while slightly drowsy from a lack of sleep and there were times when I was wondering if I was awake or if my mind was off in dreamland. It got hard to tell. This is the latest movie from Empire magazine’s Greatest Movies list from 2008 that I got to scratch off during my many, many hours spent indoors over the past months. It was not my first time experiencing the unique filmmaking style of David Lynch, and that’s a good thing because otherwise I might not have watched any of his later stuff. Eraserhead felt to me like a bizarre art house film by a young student who clearly didn’t care one bit about convention or pleasing the masses. I must not be

  One of the most fascinating things about human beings is that, as George Carlin once explained, they were smart enough to invent both napalm and silly putty. Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) perfectly illustrates the ingenuity, insanity, and stupidity of the human race as nuclear Armageddon rears its ugly head. The pilots flying the airplanes that carry the atom bombs are all smart enough to fly their aircrafts, but the people giving them orders are either insane or incompetent. It’s scary stuff, and yet you can’t help but find the humour in the madness. I think I first saw Dr. Strangelove over 15 years ago when it was playing on TV for some Stanley Kubrick retrospective. Despite the fact nowadays the news is constantly saying the world is one bad day away from imploding, I felt like revisiting it and sharing my thoughts. Maybe it’s because I needed some dark humour, maybe it’s available for free on CTV, or mayb