Simon's Movie Reviews

  A “Spaghetti Western” is a strange concept on paper, but if well-executed it makes for one epic movie. Somehow an Italian director managed to get American actors to travel all the way to Italy, shoot in some of the warmest areas in Europe to stage the Old West, and reinvented an American movie genre. Sergio Leone is the director best known for this international collaboration, and Clint Eastwood is the American actor who became an icon for his roles in his movies. Their best collaboration is undoubtedly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967) which boasts one of the best duels of all times. As the title indicates, this is the tale of three characters. The “Good” is Blondie (Eastwood), who is not that good considering he is a bounty hunter scamming the law during the American Civil War. His scheme is to capture the “Ugly”, a vicious criminal named Tuco (Eli Wallach), collect the bounty, release him right before his hanging, then start all over in a different town. “The Ugly” of ...

Clint Eastwood redefined the western genre so it is only fitting that his final film in which he proverbially rides into the sunset would end up deconstructing the genre piece by piece. In Unforgiven (1992) there is no noble hero, no villains in black hats, and killing a man is something that has a lasting impact. The film earned Eastwood two Oscars, for Best Picture and Best Director, but it is Gene Hackman who won in the performance category for his role as one of the most violent men he has ever played. He also happens to play the sheriff. The first time I started watching Unforgiven was when it was playing on TV when I was living in South America in the late 90s. Unfortunately it was playing in Spanish and it was already halfway started, and when it got to the more violent scenes I think I might have been a tad too young for them. A few years later, I am living in Quebec and I do the old fashion thing of renting the DVD so I can finally watch it from beginning to end. DVD b...

“Do I feel lucky? Well do you punk?” You know a movie is iconic when one of its lines of dialogue still sounds just as badass over 40 years later. Dirty Harry (1971), directed by Don Siegel, cemented Clint Eastwood’s status as a movie star after he had conquered the Western genre in the 1960s with Sergio Leone. As San Francisco Detective Harry Callahan he plays somewhat of a modern gunslinger, taking out bad guys with a .44 magnum revolver, and often working outside the bounds of the law in the process. He may not be a model for real-life cop, but Callahan served as the template for hard-boiled cops for decades to come. Eastwood’s characterization and dialogue from the film has been so ingrained in pop culture I had a rough idea of who Harry Callahan was long before ever seeing Dirty Harry . Jim Carrey parodies the “feel lucky” speech in The Mask (1993) and in the 90s I would watch the Lethal Weapon movies, which essentially had Mel Gibson playing a modern-day Harry Callahan. T...

Clint Eastwood is one of those actors whose name immediately evokes the image of the mythic American cowboy. Perhaps second only to John Wayne, many of Eastwood’s movies have become classic Westerns, only many of them are quite darker in tone than Wayne’s films. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is one such film. Featuring Eastwood behind the camera and in top anti-hero form as a gunslinger who sends many men to their graves across the American south after his family is killed during the Civil War. He may not wear a Sheriff’s badge, but once he draws his guns you can’t help but root for him. Another English-to-Spanish exercise, this was a movie I watched while living in South America in the early 2000s. Possibly HBO or some other movie channel would run old American movies with Spanish subtitles, which is a good way to learn the language when you first move to Chile and which you get used to once you actually learn the language. Either way, it’s a Clint Eastwood movie, and if a Clin...