Simon's Movie Reviews

American high schools were fertile ground for John Hughes as a writer and director. They provided the setting for the classic The Breakfast Club (1985), which featured five typical characters from that world, and the following year Hughes struck gold again with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off . That movie featured a character who is in a way the king of a Chicago high school and who is so confident he skilfully skips school with his best friend and girlfriend by his side. Ferris is a bit like James Bond for high school: girls want him and boys want to be him. For many people this was a movie that defined their generation, especially if they saw it while still in high school. However since it came out the year I was born that was impossible for me. It’s a shame, because the high school movie that was the big hit during my formative years was American Pie (1999). Generation X people got to see Matthew Broderick sing Twist and Shout at a parade, while Millenials got to see Jason Biggs st...

I will never go to the opera, but I consume movies like food so watching Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984) is probably the closest I will ever get to spending a night at the opera. There have been plenty of biographies about singers and artists, but most of them are about rock musicians who ascend to greatness before crashing and burning because of their drug addiction. The life of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart doesn’t feature any cocaine-fuelled downfalls, but it still has plenty of drama courtesy of a scheming competing artist straight out of a Shakespeare play. The movie was a massive critical hit when it was released in the 1980s and made a star out of F. Murray Abraham as the man planning Mozart’s downfall. It also had the unfortunate side effect of having him be pigeon holed as a villain for many movies to come, something that was referenced in the action movie parody Last Action Hero . In that meta movie within a movie the young protagonist tries to warn Arnold Schwarzene...