Simon's Movie Reviews

In the 1990s Hollywood directors were the kings of cinema, whether it was for big summer blockbusters or smaller independent films. Guys like James Cameron or Michael Bay would blow up the screens while Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino put the emphasis on snappy dialogue that created relatable characters for the moviegoers. Then in 1996, as if to scream “we can do this too,” Danny Boyle released Trainspotting in the United Kingdom. Based on a novel by Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh, the movie took the world by storm despite having no explosions, a cast of actors who were relatively unknown and a budget that today could barely pay for the catering of a Transformers movie. Furthermore this is not the story of young people going to college to enter a life full of promise, but about young heroine addicts meandering through the streets of Edinburgh. Despite introducing these characters during an energetic montage set to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life , Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Ho...

One could make the argument that Edward Scissorhands (1990) is the ultimate Tim Burton movie. It is set in a pastel-coloured American suburb, it has a memorable score by composer Danny Elfman and it marked the first collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Furthermore it has a small key role for horror icon Vincent Price, whose movies Burton watched as a child. It is unconventional for sure, but like a lot of Burton’s work it has become iconic to the point of influencing pop culture. I was very young when this movie came out in theatres and like most of Tim Burton’s movies it is in a bit of a grey area when it comes to age restriction. Batman Returns for instance is a comic book movie, but a comic book movie in which one villain is electrocuted to death and another spews black blood out of his mouth before dying. Edward Scissorhand is nowhere near as graphic, but it is probably still a good idea that I waited until I was in my teen years before watching it on TV. I...