Simon's Movie Reviews

The least you can say about the Japanese people is that they are a resilient bunch. They were bombed twice with nuclear bombs at the end of World War II, their economy was left in ruins, and their empire was crumbled by the new emerging American one. How did they recover? They became the world’s best provider of electronics. Read the end credits of any Nintendo game, most of the names are Japanese. But video games weren’t enough. They also emerged as a global influence on comic books and cartoons with manga and anime. If you are ever interested in learning about these two art forms, you couldn’t do better than Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 anime movie “Akira,” based on his own best selling two-part manga. I saw this movie as part of my Friday night film club at the University of Sherbrooke in the fall of 2008. That night OMASUS (Obscure Movie Appreciation Society of the University of Sherbrooke) was showing a double feature comprising of “Blade Runner” and “Akira.” Appropriate, since “Akira...

You know the old saying “you can’t make this stuff up”? Writer Charlie Kaufman comes up with movie ideas that are so ludicrous they simply have to be made up. If you look at some of his writing credits, it’s a miracle any of his movies ever got made. How did he pitch the script for “Being John Malkovich” and got Spike Jonze to direct it? “A man finds a portal into the head of John Malkovich and is then ejected into a New Jersey turnpike. Oh, and the portal is located in the 7 ½ floor of an office building in New York City.” If I had been the Hollywood producer listening to that pitch, I would probably have had a few follow-up questions. I first heard of this movie when I saw the trailer on TV during one of my summer vacations in Quebec City. My first thought was, that is one weird movie. My second was “who the heck is John Malkovich?” Eventually I saw “Con Air” on VHS and then I knew. Then around 2009, when I was living off-campus at the university of Sherbrooke, I saw that ...

Joe Wright’s “Atonement” (2007) is a war drama focusing on three people who have their own personal drama to deal with as the world falls apart. Keira Knightley plays Cecilia Tallis, a young woman living in an upper class mansion in the British countryside. James McAvoy is Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son who can’t keep his eyes off her. Saoirse Ronan plays Briony, Cecilia’s younger sister, who will destroy their lives. The worst part is, it was all a big misunderstanding. This was yet another one of those movies I had to wait until the DVD came out so that I could watch it in the original English version. For a while that became my game plan for big Hollywood movies. If the movie theatres in Quebec wouldn’t release them in English, I would wait a couple of months and then rent three of them per week during my summer break from university. It’s a shame, because “Atonement” is beautifully shot and deserves a big screen. The whole drama begins with a small mistake, leading to a h...

Have you ever been flipping through your TV channels and suddenly you run into a media circus? Those are a lot of fun. The name fits incredibly well too. A circus implies entertainment, clowns, a ringmaster and an audience. However, the media part of the equation implies cameras and possibly a global audience, no matter how silly or violent the situation might turn out to be. That is the situation in which Al Pacino’s character is plunged into in Sydney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” from 1975. I must have been around ten when I first saw this movie and I remember being dumbstruck by how crazy the situation got with each passing minute. My family and I had recently moved to Santiago, Chile and I guess dad was just flipping through the TV one evening when the show started. I wouldn’t exactly call it a family movie, but I was entertained, that’s for sure. It all starts simply enough. Al Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik who, along with his partners Salvatore “Sal” Naturile (John Cazale) and St...

The year 1994 was a good one for Jim Carrey. He exploded into the mainstream with the hit films “The Mask,” “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” and “Dumb and Dumber.” These are the kinds of movies my parents thought were stupid beyond description. Meanwhile, my brother and I were busy laughing our heads off at the sight of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels driving across America in a car covered in fur. They may have been dumb, but they sure were funny. I can’t recall exactly when I first saw Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s “Dumb and Dumber” but I am positive it was during one of our many family trips when my brother and I had our own hotel room and access to TV channels that showed raunchy comedies. My brother had seen it before I did, so I kept hearing a preview of what was to come. It sounded disgusting, immature, and stupid. SOLD! Jim Carrey plays Lloyd Christmas, a limo driver, and Jeff Daniels plays Harry Dunne, a pet groomer who drives the aforementioned dog car. To say these two guys are st...

Here’s the thing about us guys: we love our toys. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about cars, guns, comic books, video games, or vinyl records, we just love to collect stuff and talk about it with other guys. In Stephen Frear’s “High Fidelity” John Cusack plays Rob Gordon, a man who owns a records store in Chicago, talks about music with his friends, and constantly makes “top 5 lists.” Like most guys, he is good at his job; he excels at his hobby, but can’t seem to get it right when it comes to women. I bought this movie late in the summer of 2009 and watched in an off-campus residence next to the University of Sherbrooke. This is one of those movies that I feel speaks directly to me. It’s filled with characters who have encyclopaedic knowledge of things they like and who use “Evil Dead II” as a metaphor. I actually met a few guys on campus who would have been perfectly at home working in Rob’s store. The movie begins after Rob’s girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) breaks up with hi...

Most of the time movie stars sell movies. On rare occasions, a director has such a unique body of work that he is the selling point. David Cronenberg is one of those exceptions. He has created some of the most psychologically disturbing horror movies to play in Canada and around the world much to the pride/shame of critics. Some of his movies feature monsters that infect you from within and turn you into an abomination. With “A History of Violence”, his first collaboration with actor Viggo Mortensen, he shows the horrible things people can do without the help of monsters. This movie came out in late September of 2005, just as the summer movie season ended and the fall season began. A perfect release date, since it is definitely not popcorn entertainment, but it does have enough solid performances for award considerations. I saw it on the big screen, during one of those rare times when a movie was released in English in Quebec City. I remember being surprised by the violence. I don’t ...