Simon's Movie Reviews

  Sometimes in a detective story the mystery is not half as fun as the detective stuck in the chaos of the story. Philip Marlow is one of those detectives. His name is synonymous with Hollywood noir and in The Long Goodbye (1973), he dives deep into a mystery involving a murder, then a suicide, then a missing person, and eventually a very violent gangster operating in sunny Los Angeles. One thing I love about this version is that this detective loves his cat enough to go buy him food at three o’clock in the morning. Now that is a dedicated pet lover. The late great director Robert Altman starts the action at a slow pace to introduce Marlowe (Eliott Gould) as he wakes up to his hungry cat. Here is a man who falls asleep in his clothes, always the same suit and tie, and is either constantly smoking or lighting a new cigarette. He is a friendly person, nice enough to pick up an item for his neighbours while going out to get cat food. It probably helps that said neighbours are five y...

  An American Werewolf in London (1981) is quite the strange beast. This is a werewolf movie from John Landis, director of comedy classics such The Blues Brothers and Trading Places , that is full of gore, gratuitous nudity, tension, and quite a few laughs. The movie’s tone is sometimes inconsistent, switching one minute from horror to self-aware comedy. However, it earns its place in the pantheon of horror thanks to one of the best werewolf transformation scenes courtesy of effects legend Rick Baker. I feel like I watched this movie in the wrong venue and with the wrong frame of mind. This is not a movie to watch by yourself on Tubi for free with commercial breaks. This is a movie to watch on the big screen with a midnight crowd after a few drinks. Some movies require the audience to be quiet, An American Werewolf in London needs an engaged and possibly drunk crowd to laugh at the jokes, the absurdity of the situation, and the bloody kills. Hollywood has a few weekends to fill thi...

  Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) is one of those movies that gets more relevant with each passing decade. Set in a (now passed) future in which Los Angeles is overrun with people and pollution, the story focuses on artificial lifeforms clashing with their human creators. As the chase for these lifeforms progresses, writers Hampton Francher and David Peoples imply they may not be so different from the humans chasing them. If this sounds topical in 2024, imagine how relevant it will sound ten years from now. When writing these amateur reviews, I usually try to think back on the first time I watched the movie and what I felt at the time. This is tricky with Blade Runner considering there have been five versions of the film released since the 1980s. I believe the first version I did see on TV was the original theatrical version with the narration to guide the audience since executives thought that was needed. I eventually disagreed and purchased the Final Cut on Blu-Ray to see th...

  Star Wars . One movie, with a two-word title that was directed by a young director who wanted to do Flash Gordon but couldn’t get the rights. Decades later and that one movie is now retitled A New Hope , is the first chapter in a trilogy, the fourth episode in a saga, and the seed of what is essentially a genre within cinema. For better or for worse, this movie was the equivalent of an Earth-shattering earthquake in Hollywood history. Before 1977 George Lucas was just an up-and-coming director whose career could have ended had this been a failure. Instead, the movie and its sequels made him one of the most known filmmakers in the world, and a whole generation became familiar with words like “lightsaber”, “X-Wing”, and “Wookie”. For some truly hardcore fans, these movies are the equivalent of a gospel, so much so that they will write “Jedi” as their religion of choice. My first dive into the Star Wars universe was as a child, watching the movies on VHS in the 1990s after my pare...

  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 ...

Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) manages to be an outstanding thriller while also educating the audience about the mechanics of making such a movie. Many moviegoers might not understand the concept of editing, sound mixing, or why they have their own categories at the Oscars. Through the eyes (and ears) of a sound technician, we get to see how every sound in any movie is carefully picked in order to elicit the right reaction from the audience. Things take a tragic turn when said technician records an actual murder. Jack Terry (John Travolta) is a self-described “sound guy” who has quite a few movies under his belt. Unfortunately, those movies are not Oscar-winning dramas shot in Hollywood, but low-budget slasher films that border on sexploitation. Yet Jack works diligently out of his Philadelphia office, always trying to find the right sound to mix into the film. Those sounds can be anything from the sounds of a creaking door to the scream of an actress as a maniac is about to stab h...

  Alien (1979) is a perfectly executed horror movie with a simple premise that works and a slim cast treating the material seriously. The movie’s one-word title perfectly sums up the story and its deadly antagonist: an unknown alien creature is aboard a spacecraft and is killing the crew one by one. This is a B-movie plot that had been done before plenty of times and has been imitated repeatedly. However, in the highly capable hands of Ridley Scott, this haunted house movie set in space slowly build up to be one of the scariest thrillers ever made with only a few jump scares. It helps that the monster is one of the scariest creatures ever designed in the history of horror.   Two things about me and this movie’s monster: first, when I was a kid, seeing it in a 30-second trailer was enough to scare me. Second, Mel Brooks made it a lot less scary. There is an entire generation of movie-goers who were scared and possibly vomited in their popcorn bags when they first saw the sce...

  Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) is a very well made look at how reporters, back when they still had stable careers, operate in unstable countries. It looks at ethical questions, from the point of view of both the journalists covering the conflicts, and the people who actually live in the country and have to live with the impact of their coverage. One of these people is a photographer played by an award-winning Linda Hunt. Unfortunately, the other major role is played by Mel Gibson, a name now synonymous with controversy, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from seeing the movie. Between Christmas and the start of 2022 like many people I was stuck indoors with a lot of time to kill so I caught up on a few shows and movies. I can’t say I was itching to complete my viewing of Mel Gibson’s filmography, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Linda Hunt have such a prominent role. Certain TV viewers might know her as the boss on NCIS LA , but here we see her early in her...