Simon's Movie Reviews

I thoroughly enjoy cult movies as well as movies that colour outside the lines and Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) checks off those two boxes with a big fat checkmark. Like many cult movies it was a commercial failure when first released, which is not too surprising considering it is a comedy that deals with death, suicide and a romantic relationship between an 18-year-old man and a 79-year-old woman. Despite the grim subject matter it is an often funny, and yes, romantic movie. Unlike cult films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show I don’t think there are any midnight showings of Harold and Maude so it took me a while to even hear about it. I first read about it in Empire magazine and the premise definitely struck me as unique. You can easily pitch a movie about superheroes, spies, or romance, but how do you sell a movie about a senior citizen who steals police motorcycles and a young man who fakes elaborate suicides? Thanks to good old Netflix I managed to finally see it a...

The average moviegoer will know Peter Sellers solely for his work in The Pink Panther franchise, but devout film fans will know one of his best performances was in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). Sellers was a performer who could easily inhabit colourful characters, whether that was the bumbling inspector Clouseau or the deranged Dr. Strangelove, but the character of Chance the gardener in Ashby’s film is a person who almost has no personality to speak of. Yet Sellers’ performance and the situations in which the character is plunged ended up making Being There a memorable send off, as it was Sellers’ last film. The reason I know it was his last film is because I learned it from watching his biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers in which he his portrayed by Geoffrey Rush. In that movie, whether it is 100 per cent accurate or not, Sellers pursues the role of Chance in Being There with great enthusiasm because he saw it as chance to prove he could play something other than a...