Simon's Movie Reviews

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...

And you thought your prom night was bad. Had it happened in real life, the tale of Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) and what she did after a horrible prank during her big moment at her prom would have become an urban legend to scare high school students for generations. Fortunately it is only a work of fiction envisioned by horror master Stephen King and first brought to the big screen by Brian De Palma in 1976. It is an undoubtedly scary film, but also one that deals with important themes such as bullying, kindness, and acceptance. This is one of those stories where I really did my homework. I have given myself the goal to read all of Stephen Kings’ oeuvre and Carrie is one of his earliest novels. In addition to seeing De Palma’s adaptation on Netflix have also seen the 2013 remake directed by Kimberly Peirce with Chloe Grace Moretz in the Carrie role. Both movies tell pretty much the same story with different budgets, but I must conclude the original is bleaker and much more in the...

Throughout his career Al Pacino has played many criminals, but as he aged so did the gangsters. In 1983 he played the demented Tony Montana in Brian de Palma’s Scarface , setting the bar for ambitious drug lords the world over. Ten years later Pacino and De Palma reunited for Carlito’s Way , which asked the question: what if Montana got caught, sent to prison, released back into society, and then tried to be a good boy? Well as Pacino said in The Godfather Part III :   “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” The movie came out in 1993 when I was seven years old so of course this is not a movie I saw on the big screen. Too bad, because it is filled with De Palma’s visual flair, specifically in a climactic shootout at a train station. Fortunately I eventually caught up with it about 15 years later when it was playing on the Movie Network, which is always a great help if you want to catch up on classics during a long weekend. Chronologically it worked out great s...

In the gangster genre, it is an unwritten rule that the bad guy must fall by the end. That was certainly true in the Howard Hawks film Scarface from 1932 in which gangster Tony Montana pleads for his life before making a run for it and getting mowed down by the police. In Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake however, there is no begging for mercy and Tony does most of the mowing down, with the classic line “Say hello to my little friend!” In terms of general plotting, the two films are very similar, but you could say the remake is the same story “on steroid,” or more accurately “on cocaine” as Montana spends most of the third act abusing his product as he nears his downfall. There are movies you have seen before actually seeing them and that was certainly the case with Scarface . Like Pulp Fiction and Fight Club , it has had a major impact on pop culture, and even crime culture. Would-be rappers want to emulate Tony Montana’s rags-to-riches tale, while would-be gangsters want to imita...

Hat-wearing gangsters armed with Tommy guns have been gone for decades, but movies and TV shows about them are as popular as ever. From The Godfather to Boardwalk Empire , stories about bootleggers, hoodlums, mobsters and the cops doing their best to bring them down still fascinate people. Some are based on fact while some are based on legends. Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), working off a script from David Mamet, seems to lean more towards the legend in order to offer more of a spectacle. Understandable, given the movie’s villain, Al Capone, is a legend of crime. As it is a crowd-favourite, I had seen bits and pieces of The Untouchables playing on TV every now and then. I eventually rented the DVD to watch the whole thing with some nifty behind-the-scenes nuggets, something you don’t get today with Netflix and iTunes. It was my little ritual when I was finishing high school in Quebec City if I had nothing to do that weekend. Head to the video store, get one of those ...