Simon's Movie Reviews

  Vertigo (1958) checks off all the boxes for an Alfred Hitchcock movie: there is an elaborate murder scheme, a man in way over his head, and a blonde woman who is more than what she seems. The film also highlights Hitchcock’s ability to utilize the tools of his trade as it was the first movie to use a dolly zoom, which helped give audiences a glimpse of what it must feel like to experience the titular feeling of vertigo. Not being too keen on heights myself, I have to say the zoom has the desired effect. I crossed this movie off the list after my mom gave me an Alfred Hitchcock DVD box set filled with five of his greatest hits. From Rear Window to Psycho , these are the movies that if you have not seen them, you have seen other movies that either reference them or parody them. Vertigo is a bit less ingrained in pop culture, so I watched it not quite knowing what to expect. That is the best way to go in, as this is one of Hitchcock’s most cerebral thrillers with quite a few twis...

You know a director has done something right when a scene in his movie is parodied and referenced 50 years later. Even more impressive is the fact said scene is a murder scene in which the audience doesn't see any blood except the one it imagines is flowing from the victim. Psycho (1960) is indeed quite an oddity given it is based on a novel that itself was based loosely on the horrid crimes of Ed Gaines. Yet Alfred Hitchcock, who apparently never backed away from a challenge, thought this was just the right material for his next movie. Good thing, because cinema history was never the same again. This is one of those movies that you have seen even if you have never seen it before, mainly because of that shower scene and the titular psycho doing the stabbing. It has been parodied countless times by everyone from Wes Craven to Mel Brooks, and even Bugs Bunny. Bernard Herrman's iconic music, which practically screams in unison with Janet Leigh as the blade strikes, has ...

With North by Northwest (1959) Alfred Hitchcock finally hit peak Hitchcock. It has many of the tropes from his past movies such as an accidental hero with slight mother issues, a sexy blond female co-star, international villains, and a MacGuffi. However it also goes further than any of Hitchcock’s previous work by having the well-dressed protagonist embark on a crazy adventure that takes him to various set pieces that each become and more and more dangerous. On the surface it may all seem terribly silly, but crucially it is also incredibly fun. I got the movie on DVD as part of an Alfred Hitchcock essentials collection a few years ago for Christmas, but its action set pieces are so iconic I had already seen them be parodied in pop culture many times before. For instance, the sequence where the hero is attacked by a crop duster is replicated in the spoof Wrongfully Accused , but because it is a Leslie Nielsen comedy the crop duster is a small toy plane. Then there is the final sta...

We live in an age where voyeurism is not only accepted, but also sometimes encouraged thanks to social media tools that lets anybody share photos and videos of themselves to, well, anybody. The concept of peaking into someone else’s life is of course not new, as exemplified in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Rear Window (1954) in which a wheelchair-bound man kills time by starring at his neighbours through binoculars. A slightly immoral pastime, but it gets him in a world of trouble when he believes he might have witnessed one neighbour disposing of a murder victim. The concept is so genius and has been repeated so many times over the years that by the time I got the Rear Window DVD as a Christmas present along with a few other Hitchcock classics I already had a pretty good idea of how this story goes. Times have changed since 1954, but the movie’s concept still works and has been copied and/or parodied by everyone from Saturday Night Live to Tiny Toon Adventures . Of course to f...

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...