Simon's Movie Reviews

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has often been referred to as the Walt Disney of Japan. I would argue in some cases he is even better than the man who created Mickey Mouse. The animation in his movies are stunning, the characters are humans who deal with real-life emotions and pains, and his stories have mostly no villains. His 1988 classic My Neighbor Totoro checks all those boxes and introduced the world to Miyazaki’s own Mickey Mouse even if this creature is limited to only saying his own name. Think of it as a Pokémon minus the annoyance.  It’s hard to keep track, but I believe the last time I was in theatres to see a movie was in early March. Since then it’s been deep dives into movies I own and everything available on streaming services. This year Netflix got its hands-on Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli movies, which gave me a chance to check My Neighbor Totoro off my watch list. It will probably be a few more weeks at least before we can all go back to theatres, so I highly reco...

Every now and then a movie comes along that challenges the limits of what violent content can be shown on the big screen. Somehow, many of these movies often come from Asia. Make of that what you will, but the fact is in the year 2000 the Japanese film Battle Royale went where no American movie would ever dare go. The concept of school children killing each other on an island is of course a demented satire, full of exaggerated violence and gallons of blood spilled by an arsenal of weapons, but for 11 years it was never released in the United States or Canada. Controversial? That was actually a selling point. It took me a while to get to this movie, but I definitely heard about it for years. I first saw the trailer at a cinema while living in South America, but since I was around 13 years old at the time I was way too young to see it. Given the brief glimpses of violence of what I saw in the trailer I am not sure I wanted to anyway. By that time I was in college in Quebec City in...