Simon's Movie Reviews

How about that? It is almost Halloween, I am working my way up the list of Greatest Movies, and next up is William Friedkin’ The Exorcist (1973), also known as one of the scariest movies of all time. I couldn’t possibly have planned this. I did not plan on watching it last year, but the uncut version became available on iTunes for 99 cents just a few days after Halloween so now I was out of excuses. Here is a movie that has been terrorizing audiences and influencing other horror movies for decades, so I might have had a smidge of apprehension. When the uncut version was released in 2000 I was living in Peru and the trailers were talking about it like it was a major movie event for this thing to be back on the big screen. I knew it had to be scary, because my dad strongly advised against seeing it. The closest I came to seeing it at a young age was when seeing Scary Movie 2 in 2001. You know, the scene where James Wood, Andy Richter and Natasha Lyonne are target vomiting at each...

Unless you are a film student or a fan of all cinema, when you hear the name Ingmar Bergman odds are you think boring European films in black and white. Or maybe you have never heard the name at all. Yet his 1957 classic “The Seventh Seal” is not only filled with profound ideas about faith, religion and mortality but it also some rather funny scenes bordering on slapstick. Then of course there is that iconic scene at the beginning where knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow) is playing chess with Death (Bengt Ekerot) to delay his demise. Before watching the film I had seen that particular image parodied plenty of times in pop culture, most notably in an episode of Animaniacs, only Yako convinced Death to play checkers instead. Still, before watching it the first time at the University of Sherbrooke’s film club I didn’t really know what to expect. It was part of a double feature with “Persona,” another classic, which I found more difficult to follow. On th...