Simon's Movie Reviews

  The question “if you had a time machine, what would you do?” has generated a lot of entertaining conversations. The team behind Back to the Future (1985) took that question and added “what if you met your parents when they were young?”. The result is one of the best time travel stories ever made, which catapulted Michael J. Fox to stardom and gave Christopher Lloyd one of his most enduring roles. There were plenty of ways it could have gone wrong, but with this one lightning hit, sending a DeLorean back to the future. Given the film’s relationship with time, when you see it can impact your relationship with the story. I first saw it in the late 1990s, about 15 years after it came out, and about 15 years before Marty McFly would travel to the future in the second movie. For me the 1980s and the 1950s are foreign eras to which I have no emotional connections, but I was still fascinated by the movie’s story of a young man travelling back in time and meeting his parents. It also he...

Nothing drives a good drama like conflict, and with movies I love it when said conflict is someone defying authority. It can be something large scale like a rebel trying to take down a government, but it can work just as well on a smaller scale such as a rebel defying a head nurse in a mental institution. Of course in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), it helps that the rebel is played by Jack Nicholson at the top of his game facing a head nurse played with icy perfection by Louise Fletcher. There are many ways in which I first enjoyed this story: by reading the book by Ken Kesey on which it is based, eventually renting the DVD, and also by seeing it performed onstage. No offense to Mr. Nicholson, but that last one is actually my favourite experience since it was a school play in which my older brother played one of the patients, at one point stealing the show I might add. This was in the late 90s when my brother and I were going to an American high school in...

Wouldn’t it be cool if cartoons co-existed with human beings? Let me rephrase that: how awesome would it be if Daffy Duck and Donald Duck were to have a duel of pianos at a members-only club in 1940s Hollywood? Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), based on the book Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf, successfully imagines such a world and most importantly manages to convince the audience cartoons are actually interacting with human beings. Its director, Robert Zemeckis, has always been a master at mixing groundbreaking special effects with an engaging story, so if anyone was going to get this story right, it had to be him. Pulling the strings at the top of the production chain was none other than Steven Spielberg, who although better known for his directorial work, has produced some of the most memorable movies of the 80s, including this one. But just how do you classify Who Framed Roger Rabbit ? I first saw a French-dubbed version of the film on VHS in the early 90s while li...