Simon's Movie Reviews

On paper David Fincher’s Seven (1995) sounds like just about every other serial killer movie that came before. You have the senior detective inching his way towards retirement, the hotheaded rookie, and the killer murdering people in the dark streets of the city according to his own twisted logic. Then the movie gets to THAT ending and the answer to the question: “WHAT’S IN THE BOX!?” Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker could have just made a standard serial killer movie with great performances and dark street corners, but by making that uncompromising conclusion they delivered one of the best films of the 1990s. It is a good thing the movie was made before the rise of social media, because the ending might have been spoiled for many viewers. When I rented the movie in the early 2000s I just knew it was a movie about a maniac who kills people according to the seven deadly sins, I knew nothing about the content of a certain box. Therefore it was a genuine surprise for me to se...

When it comes to movie monsters, vampires go in and out of fashion with mixed results: sometimes you get a great retelling of Dracula, sometimes you get Twilight . In between, you get the work of Anne Rice, whose Vampire Chronicles has not had the same success on the big screen as Stephanie Myers’ books, but her first entry is one of the best exploration of what it must be like to be a vampire. Interview with the Vampire (1994) features the life and times of two vampires, one a complete sociopath who sees humans as cattle, and the other a man with guilt over the people he has destroyed. In a brilliant casting stroke, they are played by two of the biggest movie stars in the world. If you are behind on your horror movie watching, October is a great month because all the movie channels play the old classics, or just the successful ones. So during a holiday from the university while staying in Quebec City, I saw Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Interview with the Vampire ...

At his peak, the outlaw Jesse James was the most famous outlaw in America. Brad Pitt is one of the most famous movie stars in the world, so it was a no brainer to cast him as the lead in Andrew Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” But as the long title says it, this isn’t just about James, but about the smaller man who tried to rise from under his shadow. Like Brad Pitt, James had many admirers, and in the case of Robert Ford, the kind movie stars fear: an obsessive fan with deadly ambitions. I saw this movie as a result of a scriptwriting class at the University of Sherbrooke in 2008. To be honest I didn’t find the teacher to be very knowledgeable. He was telling us about a screenwriters’ strike that happened in the 1980s, but he didn’t even know there had been one that very year. My guess is, he was learning about this stuff just as we were. Still, he mentioned Andrew Dominik’s Jesse James movie a few times, praising the script. That weekend...