Simon's Movie Reviews

  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 ...

Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a true piece of cinema history. For one thing it is classic film noir, a genre rarely seen nowadays, and for another the cast if filled with actors and key players from a bygone era. It also helps that the plot is highly memorable to the point that 50 years later it has been parodied or referenced by shows such as Twin Peaks and even Tiny Toon Adventures . That’s a sign of cultural significance as far as I am concerned. The ideal place to watch this movie would be in a classroom on cinema history, and if I recall well that is exactly what I did around nine years ago in Vancouver. The course was Hollywood cinema 1930-1960, a perfect time frame for Sunset Boulevard since it features cameos by Buster Keaton and other actors of the silent films that ran in the 1930s, and iconic director Cecil B. DeMille, who is responsible for a few classics himself. The movie’s lead female character is movie star from the bygone era of the silent films, bu...