Simon's Movie Reviews

Some movies start off with a bang but with his 1958 film noir Touch of Evil cinema legend Orson Welles decided to start with three minutes and 20 seconds leading to the bang. During a tracking shot set in a U.S – Mexico border town we follow a car right after an unseen person has installed a crude bomb in the trunk. It’s a lovely evening with people having a good time and border agents diligently doing their jobs as they let the car cross over onto the American side. Then the bomb goes off, two people die violently, and suddenly it’s not such a good evening. That’s one way to hook in your audience. Some people resolve to eat better, quit smoking or do more exercise for the New Year. As we start off 2019 one of my resolutions is to try to watch more classics films, and even though I got a lot of great films as Christmas gifts I thought I would use my day off to check one classic film I had never seen off my list. Of course I am familiar with Orson Welles, a filmmaker so prolific...

The movie with the iconic ending where Charlton Heston damns them to hell, the original “Planet of the Apes” (1968) was one of the first science-fiction franchises of the second half of the 20 th century. It started with one movie featuring talking apes and then spawned four sequels, two TV series, a Tim Burton remake and then a re-energized prequel with the ever-versatile James Franco. Not bad for a film with a very Z-movie concept and a Twilight Zone ending. Seeing the original Franklin J. Schaffner version for the first time was like seeing a dusty old blueprint for a building I had seen many times before. I had seen the Tim Burton remake while living in Peru, and while there I also saw one of the sequels, “Escape from the Planet of the Apes,” on TV. Unfortunately, I had also already seen the big twist ending of the original movie when the American Film Institute did one of their specials on great movies. They should really stop giving the ending away when they re-e...