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...

Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) is fascinating for many reasons, the most obvious being its reverse order that brings the viewers back to the beginning. Or is it the ending? That this was only Nolan’s second film proved this guy is a master storyteller, which is probably why Warner Bros. went to him to resurrect Batman after Joel Schumacher had buried it under layers of campiness in Batman and Robin . The protagonist of Memento probably sees himself as a hero since he is trying to avenge the death of a loved one, but as Nolan would shows in his Dark Knight trilogy sometimes revenge is not black and white. I first saw the film while I was studying at the University of Sherbrooke and it was being shown in the local film club as part of a double feature along with Nolan’s first movie Following , which seen together can spark interesting conversations about morality. One film has a character following strangers and getting into all sorts of trouble. The second is about a mentally...