Simon's Movie Reviews

  Watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) is just like watching a live-action cartoon. There is plenty of slapstick humour, an undefeatable character surviving physically impossible situations, and of course a happy ending. By today’s standards it is heavily dated in terms of technology, but it speaks volumes about Chaplin’s talent that his movie is still entertaining. I also have a feeling plenty of cartoonists were inspired by his style in the decades that followed his success. Charlie Chaplin is an icon of cinema and was at one point one of the biggest movie stars in the world. You’ll excuse if I haven’t seen all of his movies since they came out early last century, but I have made some headway in his filmography. I saw Modern Times at a university film course, and my fiancée and I recently enjoyed The Great Dictator that is now available on Netflix along with many of Chaplin’s other successes. The Gold Rush is a bit less profound in terms of content, but what it lac...

    Life is often stranger than fiction, which is why many fiction writers look to real life for their stories. German cinema icon Werner Herzog, who has made as many documentaries as fiction films, clearly has a passion for real-life stories about extraordinary characters. In The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) his focus is on a man whose origins has remained an unsolved mystery since the 1800s. From an anthropological standpoint it’s a fascinating story, anchored by an actor tasked with portraying a character that is essentially a blank state. Herzog has written, directed, and starred in dozens of movies since the start of his career and sadly I have only seen a few. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is probably his most known commercial work since it features Nicolas Cage going full Nicolas Cage. Then of course anyone with a Disney + subscription now knows Herzog as “The Client” in The Mandalorian. The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is nowhere near as flashy as any of...

  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 no...