Simon's Movie Reviews

  Star Wars . One movie, with a two-word title that was directed by a young director who wanted to do Flash Gordon but couldn’t get the rights. Decades later and that one movie is now retitled A New Hope , is the first chapter in a trilogy, the fourth episode in a saga, and the seed of what is essentially a genre within cinema. For better or for worse, this movie was the equivalent of an Earth-shattering earthquake in Hollywood history. Before 1977 George Lucas was just an up-and-coming director whose career could have ended had this been a failure. Instead, the movie and its sequels made him one of the most known filmmakers in the world, and a whole generation became familiar with words like “lightsaber”, “X-Wing”, and “Wookie”. For some truly hardcore fans, these movies are the equivalent of a gospel, so much so that they will write “Jedi” as their religion of choice. My first dive into the Star Wars universe was as a child, watching the movies on VHS in the 1990s after my parents

  The question “if you had a time machine, what would you do?” has generated a lot of entertaining conversations. The team behind Back to the Future (1985) took that question and added “what if you met your parents when they were young?”. The result is one of the best time travel stories ever made, which catapulted Michael J. Fox to stardom and gave Christopher Lloyd one of his most enduring roles. There were plenty of ways it could have gone wrong, but with this one lightning hit, sending a DeLorean back to the future. Given the film’s relationship with time, when you see it can impact your relationship with the story. I first saw it in the late 1990s, about 15 years after it came out, and about 15 years before Marty McFly would travel to the future in the second movie. For me the 1980s and the 1950s are foreign eras to which I have no emotional connections, but I was still fascinated by the movie’s story of a young man travelling back in time and meeting his parents. It also helped

  Looking back on the first movie in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings saga, my first thought is that people really need fantasy in their lives. The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2001, a year when to say the least the news were pretty depressing. An escape to a fantasy land filled with wizards, hobbits, elves, and dwarves engaged in a fight of good versus of evil came at just the right time. You get a certain feeling when you sit in a theater, the lights dim, and you are swept away to the beauty of Middle Earth, via New Zealand. Given the length of Jackson’s movies, it is also a fairly long escape from reality. Prior to sitting down in that theater in 2001, my knowledge of J.R.R Tolkien’s fantasy work was fair at best. I believe I had read the books at least once before and has seen the animated movie from the 1980s, but I was no Stephen Colbert. Since watching that first movie my appreciation for Tolkien’s world has grown as I own the extended cuts of every one of the mov

  A “Spaghetti Western” is a strange concept on paper, but if well-executed it makes for one epic movie. Somehow an Italian director managed to get American actors to travel all the way to Italy, shoot in some of the warmest areas in Europe to stage the Old West, and reinvented an American movie genre. Sergio Leone is the director best known for this international collaboration, and Clint Eastwood is the American actor who became an icon for his roles in his movies. Their best collaboration is undoubtedly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967) which boasts one of the best duels of all times. As the title indicates, this is the tale of three characters. The “Good” is Blondie (Eastwood), who is not that good considering he is a bounty hunter scamming the law during the American Civil War. His scheme is to capture the “Ugly”, a vicious criminal named Tuco (Eli Wallach), collect the bounty, release him right before his hanging, then start all over in a different town. “The Ugly” of the