Simon's Movie Reviews

  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 he...

  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...

  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 ...

  Some Like it Hot (1939) features icons of American cinema at the peak of their talent and has one of the funniest line deliveries ever recorded. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon star as a pair of cross-dressing musicians on the run from the mob while screen legend Marilyn Monroe is the love interest caught in their web of lies. The shoot was apparently very difficult for Monroe, but the end result, directed by Billy Wilders, is a comedy classic. This is a very interesting movie to revisit today. For one thing Marilyn Monroe is having a bit of a moment with that new biopic out on Netflix. Then there’s the fact the two main male characters spend a good part of the movie disguised as women, which was very controversial back at the time and probably still ruffles some feathers today. There is also the question of whether the movie’s jokes still work after over 60 decades. That depends on the audience, but in 2009 I watched it as part of a film studies course in Vancouver and the class ...

  Citizen Kane (1941) is a movie whose story and reputation has overshadowed its creator, Orson Welles, and the movie itself. For many years it was described as the Greatest Movie of All Time, and Welles never managed to make a movie that was as successful. It was not for lack of trying, Welles having directed and starred in plenty of other great movies, but none had the impact of Citizen Kane . You might have heard the expression “this movie is the Citizen Kane of its genre” to describe a movie’s quality. Given it is ranked 28 th on Empire magazine’s Greatest Movies list of 2008 shows there are better movies. There is however no denying it is a cinematic achievement, whose themes of greed and power remain relevant to this day. It is also a movie so influential that the first time I watched Citizen Kane ’s story was as a parody on Tiny Toon Adventures with rich kid Montana Max in the role of Kane, and Hamton J. Pig as the journalist investigating his story. It’s funny how writer...

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) is that rare Western that goes off the beaten path, at one point quite literally by leaving the American West behind. It is also sometimes cartoonishly funny as outlaws use too much dynamite to blow up a safe, jump off a cliff to evade a posse, and have to learn a new language in the middle of a bank robbery. At its core it is the story of two friends who, despite the occasional argument, stay together until the end. The first time I saw the movie was more than a decade ago when if I wanted to watch a classic movie I had to rent it from a store. It was not the best cinematic experience since the disc was scratched and the image kept jumping in the first minutes, but eventually it got better. I recently rewatched it on Disney +, since Disney seems intent on owning everything, and was pleasantly reminded of what a fun movie this is. It is not Blazing Saddles in terms of silliness, but it’s certainly not Unforgiven in terms of violence either....

  Some movies have their main characters fight against nature, some against armies and others have them fight against institutions, always with the odds against them. Cool Hand Luke (1967) falls into that last category as it follows a character who clashes against the often-troubled institution that is the American prison system. It helps that the people in charge of said prison are borderline sadists and that the convict rebelling against the system is the legendary screen presence that is Paul Newman. I had a great first impression of this movie even though the first time I saw it was years ago while it had already started playing on TV. The dialogue was dubbed in Spanish since I was living in South America at the time, but once you get into the story it is hard to let go. Watching Paul Newman defy and outsmart prison guards is not on par with all the spectacle you see in cinemas nowadays, but it is certainly engaging. I recently rewatched the movie, from beginning to end, on ...