Simon's Movie Reviews

Christopher Nolan, easily one of the best directors working today, likes to play with his audience’s perception. In “Memento” the audience follows a character whose memory should never be trusted as it vanishes after 10 minutes. In “Inception” the characters navigate through a world that is an illusion within an illusion within another illusion. Even Batman in his Dark Knight trilogy has a flair for the theatrics. Hence it makes perfect sense for Nolan to have made “The Prestige” (2006) a movie about feuding magicians. In a film where two rivals try to outwit each other with the world’s best magic trick, don’t be surprised if the ending has fooled you. Released one year after “Batman Begins” and two years before “The Dark Knight,” “The Prestige” showed Nolan had more than one trick up his sleeve. I saw it during my first year at the University of Sherbrooke while spending one of my holidays with my mom in Quebec City. You know you have a good movie when audience members are disc...

The Indiana Jones franchise is one of those rare series where the third entry is just as good, if not better, than the previous two. It follows the same formula as the other movies, based in part on the plot of the James Bond movies: the dashing hero is given a mythical object to recover, he must get to it before an army of villains, many international borders are crossed in order to find the object, and there many chases involving cars, motorcycles, horses, and even a tank. In “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989) the villains are once again the Nazis, after the misfire of having Hindu cult leaders in the previous film. A wise choice, since everyone loves to see Nazis getting their butts kicked. An even wiser choice by director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas was casting Sir Sean Connery, James Bond himself, as Henry Jones Sr. Twice the Jones for the price of one. My parents introduced me to the wild world of doctor Jones the same way they introduced me to the ...

The film that launched James Cameron’s career into overdrive and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a global action star, The Terminator (1984) encompasses the ultimate technological nightmare. An action movie about a cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would ultimately stop the rise of the machines, the first film in the Terminator franchise is still as relevant and thrilling today as it was 29 years ago. Over the past decades we have become increasingly dependent on technology, so what if one day those machines became sentient and decide to wipe out their creators? It was science-fiction in the 1980s, but today unmanned drones can fly in just about any airspace and wipe out entire villages. Just how much artificial intelligence do these things need before they get tired of taking orders from a man sitting in front of a computer? A megahit that would spawn three sequels (so far) and a TV show, The Terminator was part of popular culture in the 1990s. It came ...

I have mixed feelings about Michael Bay. On the one hand he directed one of the best action movies of the 90s, “The Rock,” which paired Nicolas Cage with Sean Connery kicking ass on Alcatraz. Then for the entire decade of the 2000s, he gave us the Transformers trilogy, which is made up of poorly edited explosions, vapid human characters, lame jokes, and plots that made less sense that poorly translated assembly instructions from IKEA. Yet these movies have made billions of dollars around the world and have their dedicated fan base, so that is probably why the first movie made it into Empire magazine’s list of great movies at number 309.   The only reason why I went to see “Transformers” in 2007 is because it was the summer time and in the summer I really like to see explosions, gun fights and car chases on the big screen. Mr. Bay, that’s your queue. Unfortunately I was taking my summer break from the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec City where it can be very difficult to f...

Buddy comedies are the result of a good equation. You need two vastly different characters who have to work together, (most of the time against their will), good dialogue and great onscreen chemistry. In the 1980s and 1990s the prime example was Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as two cops in the “Lethal Weapon” franchise, but “Midnight Run” (1988) by Martin Brest achieves the formula just as well, not with cops but with a bounty hunter and his prey. Robert De Niro plays the tough bounty hunter while Charles Grodin is the embezzler he must bring from New York to Los Angeles. That is of course if they survive the trip and each other. I first started watching this movie at a birthday party in Santiago, Chile, back in the mid-90s. I don’t know whose idea that was but it was a weird choice because people started walking out of the room pretty soon. I guess it was a bit too much of a grown up movie for a bunch of ten-year-olds, but I kept it in mind and over the years I rediscovered by re...

Disney’s “The Lion King” (1994), directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, is two spots ahead of “Aladdin” on Empire Magazine greatest movies list. It makes sense since   it has once again all the elements of the classic Disney animated movies: great hand-drawn animation, themes of good versus evil, comedy sidekicks, cute animals, musical numbers and father issues. The story line in “The Lion King” actually tries to be a bit deeper by borrowing elements from “Hamlet.” If you are going to have a Shakespearean villain, you might as well have him voiced by Jeremy Irons. Since Disney has always been keen to market its product on every platform as soon as possible, the first I saw of this movie was in an illustrated book before the movie itself even came out. Then after watching the actual movie of course my brother and I ended up renting the game for Super Nintendo and my parents bought the soundtrack on audio cassette. These marketing guys really know their thing. Since I was t...

The name Mel Gibson has meant various things over the past 30 years. At one point it meant up and coming actor from Australia, then it meant American action star, and as of 2013 it means anti-Semitic actor with a messy personal life seeking a comeback. However in 1995 Gibson surprised everyone by directing an old school Hollywood epic in the vein of “Ben-Hur” and “Spartacus” showing he had more than one ace up his sleeve. It’s too bad his career took a nosedive in the mid 2000s, because “Braveheart” showed he could have become a great director. I got my first taste of this Gibson epic while living in Lima, Peru in the mid-90s. My brother and I were flipping channels when we got to the battle scenes at Sterling. You know the one, where the Scots defy the English by lifting their kilts. I don’t remember if we saw the whole thing through, but my brother liked it enough to put it on his Christmas list. Since this was back in the VHS era and the movie is 177 minutes long it came in a...