Simon's Movie Reviews

In the 1990s Hollywood directors were the kings of cinema, whether it was for big summer blockbusters or smaller independent films. Guys like James Cameron or Michael Bay would blow up the screens while Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino put the emphasis on snappy dialogue that created relatable characters for the moviegoers. Then in 1996, as if to scream “we can do this too,” Danny Boyle released Trainspotting in the United Kingdom. Based on a novel by Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh, the movie took the world by storm despite having no explosions, a cast of actors who were relatively unknown and a budget that today could barely pay for the catering of a Transformers movie. Furthermore this is not the story of young people going to college to enter a life full of promise, but about young heroine addicts meandering through the streets of Edinburgh. Despite introducing these characters during an energetic montage set to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life , Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Ho...

The proof that there are no movie genres British filmmaker Danny Boyle will not tackle, his science-fiction thriller “Sunshine” aims to go where no sci-fi movie has gone before: the inside of the sun. Impossible? Most likely, but then again that is why they attach the word “fiction” to science. This is a movie to watch on a cold winter afternoon, which is exactly what I ended up doing when I first saw it. I missed out on this film when it first came out in 2007, so I had to make-do and rent the DVD. This was back when I was living off campus at the university of Sherbrooke, in Québec. No roommates, so this was just me in my tiny apartment during one of my days off, unless I would go to the campus’ film club that specialized in cult movies. Seeing “Sunshine” for the first time, I thought it could eventually end up on a cult film list. Like most outer space adventures, “Sunshine” is set on a single ship with crewmembers who have to learn to live with each other for mo...