Simon's Movie Reviews

Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) is a prime example of how Christopher Walken is much more than a punch line. People often do impressions of him for his admittedly odd speech pattern, which sadly overshadows his great acting skills. In Cimino’s war film, the last he would direct before the financial disaster Heaven’s Gate , Walken plays a blue-collar worker in 1967 America who starts off as a happy young man only to be irrevocably transformed by the horrors of the Vietnam War. It is an amazing performance in a movie filled with some of the best actors of their generation also working at the top of their game. I had wanted to see this movie for a long time since it appears on many Best Movies of All Times list and it has a rather infamous Russian roulette sequence that is so iconic it became the movie’s poster. However this is a three-hour movie so you really need to clear your schedule if you are planning on viewing it all in one sitting. Fortunately it became available o...

In a world in which cameras and microphones are everywhere, from the street corners to our very own computers, The Conversation (1974) seems like a quaint and outdated thriller. It focuses on a man whose job is to spy on people, but at the same time said man is very protective of his own privacy and lives in constant fear of someone tapping his phone lines. However a major lesson of Francis Ford Coppola’s film, which still applies today, is that having a recording of someone’s private conversations is one thing, but knowing what to do with that information is whole other ball game. When I first watched The Conversation it was probably about one year after Edward Snowden leaked classified information regarding the United States’ ability to spy on practically anyone not living in a cave. If you have a cell phone, a tablet, a laptop, or just a good old landline, they will find a way to listen to what you are saying. In 1998 Gene Hackman starred in Enemy of the State , a spiritual s...