Simon's Movie Reviews

Being in a country where you don’t speak the language and most people don’t speak your language is a rather unique experience, which Sofia Coppola perfectly captured in her comedy/drama Lost in Translation (2003). Setting the movie in Japan greatly increases the feeling of isolation the two main characters feel, since at times Japanese culture almost feels like something from another world when compared to western culture. Then again with Donald Trump running for President of the United States this year Japan is starting to look pretty tame as compared to how the world was in 2003. I have not had the chance to travel to Japan, but I spent a good chunk of my teenage years in South America where I had to slowly learn Spanish for everyday use. While watching Lost in Translation I could somewhat identify with the situation of Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an American adrift in Tokyo. The first time you are in a country with a different culture, language, and time zone, there is a lot of...

I suppose it would be possible to run into a character from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) in real life, but the odds of running into that entire family seems next to impossible. The unique filmmaker’s third film ups the ante from his previous film Rushmore, so of course things become quirkier as he further advances towards his current masterpiece The Grand Budapest Hotel . The Royal Tenenbaums has all of his usual visual styles, musical preferences, and of course two of his usual collaborators, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson. The story is very “Wes Anderson,” so if it is your first time watching one of his films you may be caught by surprise, as I was when I first watched it in 2002. The film was nominated for many awards and is described as a comedy-drama, but there not many moments when you will be laughing out loud. As the film open with Alec Baldwin narrating the various exploits of the Tenenbaum children you have to wonder if the whole thing is not some long ela...

They say to understand someone else you should try to walk a mile in their shoes. With Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982) Dustin Hoffman got to get a glimpse of what women in the acting industry go through by playing an actor who pretends to be a woman in order to get a role and of course a good paycheck. Given what we know today about the gender pay gap between men and women in Hollywood, this makes the whole premise of Toostsie even funnier in an ironic way. The concept of men pretending to be women has of course been a premise for many comedies, some crude ( White Chicks ) and some classics ( Some Like it Hot ). One of the first movies I saw in that sub-genre was Mrs. Doubtfire , which some people felt was ridding on the coattails of Tootsie . When I got to watch Tootsie a few years ago when it was playing on TV I sort of understood that point given the similarities in plot. However Pollack’s film has a lot more interesting things to say, some about working actors, and many abou...

If you are ever flipping channels and you start watching a film that has already started, it shouldn’t take you too long to realize you are watching a Wes Anderson film. Rushmore (1998), his second feature film, has him finding his groove. It is filled with his signature symmetrical compositions, flat space camera moves, quirky and dry humour, and beautiful art direction. It is also Anderson’s first collaboration with the great Bill Murray, with whom he would work again on every one of his movies. Could there be an alternate universe in which these two have worked on Ghostbusters 3 ? The first Wes Anderson movie I ever saw was his third, The Royal Tenenbaums , which can be a bit jarring if you are not used to his style. Everyone can agree he has topped himself with 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel by not only delivering a beautiful and funny film, but showing us there is a great comedian within the master of villains that is Ralph Fiennes. Since Rushmore is set in a school ther...

Who you gonna call? Since 1984 there is only answer to that question: GHOSTBUSTERS! Now an established part of pop culture, in no small part thanks to Ray Parker Junior’s signature theme song, it was at the time one heck of a gamble. What were the odds that a comedy/horror movie filled with some of the most expensive special effects at the time and starring the wise-cracking comedian from Caddyshack and Stripes , one half of The Blues Brothers, and the heroine from Alien would become a massive hit? With Canadian director Ivan Reitman at the helm and Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis on writing duties, it turns out the odds were pretty good. I didn’t watch Ghostbusters until sometime in the mid 90s when it was playing on TV at my grandma’s house, but before that it was firmly ingrained in my culture. Plenty of kids could hum that earworm of a song, the animated series was doing pretty good, and I had a horn shaped like Slimer on my bicycle. I think I actually ended seeing Ghostbuste...

Filmmakers will sometime make great movies, sometimes they will make awful movies, but it is not often a director will make a great movie about another director who became known for awful movies. Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) tells the story of a director for whom there was no such thing as a bad take and consequently every bad take ended up on film. But god help him, Ed Wood passionately loved movies and led a life that did indeed warrant a great movie. This was the last movie I saw as part of a film club back when I was at the University of Sherbrooke in 2010. It was supposed to be The Last Waltz , which would have been appropriate given it was the club’s last waltz, but Ed Wood is actually a great fit for a group of people who love to watch movies and are sometimes curious about the filmmaking process. This can sometimes be twice as entertaining as the movie itself, especially in the case of Wood who was not only a bizarre character in his own right, but surrounded himself with...

There are plenty of movies focused on a particular holiday, with Christmas notably hogging the spotlight, but who knew Groundhog Day would end up with an inspirational movie about life, love, and spirituality? Starring Bill Murray as an egotistical weatherman stuck in a time loop, Groundhog Day (1993) is a film that, just like its main character, you want to live again and again…and again. Screenwriter Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis successfully create a fantastic situation in which a man must embrace the day because for him there is literally no tomorrow. This is a movie better discovered over time, and I gradually discovered it when it would play on TV back when I was living in South America in the mind-90s. As a family it was very fun to watch Bill Murray go crazy and kidnap a groundhog, but much to my surprise I later learned my mom didn’t like the movie. She didn’t like the fact Murray kept repeating the same day, even though that is the whole point. You have to han...