Simon's Movie Reviews

It can be a bit weird watching movies that were shot decades ago as well as movies in which the characters work in your own profession. With His Girl Friday (1940) I get a helping of both cases since a lot of this movie is set in a newspaper office close to 80 years ago. Some things portrayed in the movie have changed, some things have stayed the same, and as with most movies set in a certain workplace some things are down right inaccurate. However there’s no denying this remains a hugely entertaining story thanks to the rapid-fire dialogue, the film’s humour and the chemistry between the two leads. I think I first saw His Girl Friday during a university course on classic movies, but I recently re-watched it to refresh my memory. Upon first viewing I was just a university student and now I have been working as a journalist for a few years. Since then the terms “fake news” and “alternative facts” have sadly become a part of the vernacular, and it was hard not to think of that while...

With his great Western Rio Bravo (1959) Howard Hawks set the template for what could be described as the siege movie genre. It’s a simple enough premise: you have the good guys holed up in a location with a limited amount of weapons and ammunition while outside you have the bad guys trying to get in with a lot more henchmen, guns, and bullets. Hawks himself would make two more variations on this story structure throughout his career, and decades later John Carpenter would use it as an inspiration for Assault on Precinct 13 and Ghosts of Mars . Of course it had to be all-American cowboy John Wayne to be the star of Rio Bravo and start this tradition of holding up against the bad guy no matter what. In yet another rare instance of homework being fun, I discovered this classic while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2009, and wrote an essay on it and The Searchers , another John Wayne classic. I think I got a good grade, but ...