Simon's Movie Reviews

  The Matrix (1999) was the equivalent of a small earthquake in for Hollywood movies. Nobody saw it coming and yet despite a mind-bending plot it became a massive hit that influenced pop culture for years to come. Following its release it became the standard for special effects, with every new action movie boasting “it has the best special effects since The Matrix ”. Culturally it became a sort of expression to be used whenever something so bizarre has happened that it must mean we are living inside a computer simulation. In the early 2000s that was the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California, because surely that is too weird to be true. We were all pretty naïve back then. Since the movie came out in a pre-Twitter world, I first became aware of its existence in the summer of 1999 when its posters were plastered everywhere. Given that all it shows are the main characters wearing leather trench coats and sunglasses, it looked like just any other action movie...

Kathryn Bigelow is a director who did not so much break the glass ceiling as shoot her way through it. Her filmography rivals the manliest of action directors in Hollywood and in some cases surpasses them in terms of quality and style. Point Break (1991) her most commercially successful film to date, features amazing stunts, shootouts, and plenty of shots of young people at the beach. Having Gary Busey as a scenery (and meatball sandwich) chewing FBI agent certainly did not hurt either.     Since Point Break came out in at the beginning of the 1990s I did not go see it because at the time I was the target audience for Aladdin . However Bigelow’s film was not only a commercial hit, but it also gained a cult audience over the years and was eventually considered one of the best action movies of that decade. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost certainly thought so, which is why their action-movie homage Hot Fuzz has two characters watch Point Break and also recr...