Simon's Movie Reviews

Gangster films have many things in common, but gangster films set in sunny Los Angeles have a special flavour of their own. It doesn’t matter if the main characters are gun-totting criminals or crooked cops, if the setting is Tinseltown then celebrity culture will be a factor. In the Curtis Hanson directed L.A Confidential (1997) a cop moonlights as an advisor for a popular TV show about cops, a publisher of a tabloid magazine sets up celebrity arrests, and a pimp has a group of prostitutes surgically altered to look like Hollywood actresses. Throw in a femme fatale into the mix and you have one delicious piece of film noir. If I recall well this was a movie I saw on HBO with my parents a few years after it came out while we were living in South America. The content matter was somewhat mature for my age at the time, but if anything I had more trouble following the storyline since this is an over two-hour movie with lots of characters, plot twists, and betrayals. Like The Dude s...

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...

Tim Burton seems to have a strange relationship with Christmas. In 1993 he released “A Nightmare Before Christmas” his stop-motion animated opus in which Jack Skellington of Halloween Town takes over Christmas, scaring children everywhere. The year before he released “Batman Returns” his second foray in bringing the Dark Knight to the big screen. This time Batman (Michael Keaton) is fighting the maniacal Penguin (Danny DeVito), the whip-snapping Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), and the greedy Max Schreck (Christopher Walken). During their battles, children are kidnapped from their homes in the middle of the night, henchmen are burned alive, a character is pushed out of a window, and another one is electrocuted, leaving his face with a grotesque expression of pain. This funfest takes place, of course, during the Holiday season. Despite the dark and gothic tone, the movie has achieved somewhat of a cult status, even taking advantage of the Christmas setting. The first time I saw it ...