Simon's Movie Reviews

In Salt, directed by Phillip Noyce, Angelina Jolie looks like a Bond girl but moves like Jason Bourne and can wear a rubber mask like Ethan Hunt. She can take a fire extinguisher and turn it into a rocket launcher, jump from one moving truck to another on a freeway, kill dozens of armed men, and walk barefoot on a ledge of a building while holding her small dog in her backpack. That dog is in good hands. Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, an undercover CIA operative who works in a building that is disguised as the headquarters for an oil company in Washington D.C. Good cover, but one day a Russian man (Daniel Olbrychski) comes into the building claiming to be a defector. When interviewed by Salt, he tells her a story involving the assassination of J.F.K, Russian spies trained since their childhood, and a plot to kill the Russian president on U.S soil. To top it off, he finishes by saying that Evelyn Salt is the name of the spy who will pull the trigger. Salt’s co-worker Ted Winter (...

Ever had a dream that felt so real you thought it was reality? What if somebody actually managed to sneak into your mind while you were having that dream? That, in a nutshell is the premise of Inception, Christopher Nolan’s new movie and the best one to come out in a long time. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Cobb, a corporate spy who steals secrets by sneaking into people’s dreams to acquire information from their subconscious. That is called extraction. One day a powerful businessman called Saito (Ken Watanabe) asks him to commit inception, that is to say insert an idea into the mind of a person. That is where it gets complicated. Cobb explains that placing an idea inside a person’s head is the most complicated procedure that exists in his business. His partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) believes it is even impossible but to his surprise Cobb says that he has done it before. In order to do it, they will have to dig deep into the target’s mind in order to give him the impression that t...

First of all, is should be acknowledged that Terry Gilliam had a stroke of genius when he cast Tom Waits as the devil in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Gilliam has described Waits as a man who “sings about the angels with the voice of Bellezebuth.” That can’t be disputed. When the devil, or Mr. Nick as he is later referred to, asks a monk played by Christopher Plummer if he is a betting man, even a gambling addict from Las Vegas would tell the monk to stay away. The monk takes the devil’s bet and centuries later he is now Dr Parnassus, the leader of a travelling troupe of entertainers who invite people to travel to another world through a magic portal. Once inside, participants can choose a path to illumination or be tempted by the devil. Essentially, they are gambling on people’s souls. Accompanying the doctor is Anton (Andrew Garfield) a young man from the streets, Percy (Verne Troyer) Parnassus’ close confidant, and Valentina (Lily Cole) his daughter. What the good doctor ...