Simon's Movie Reviews

Nothing drives a good drama like conflict, and with movies I love it when said conflict is someone defying authority. It can be something large scale like a rebel trying to take down a government, but it can work just as well on a smaller scale such as a rebel defying a head nurse in a mental institution. Of course in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), it helps that the rebel is played by Jack Nicholson at the top of his game facing a head nurse played with icy perfection by Louise Fletcher. There are many ways in which I first enjoyed this story: by reading the book by Ken Kesey on which it is based, eventually renting the DVD, and also by seeing it performed onstage. No offense to Mr. Nicholson, but that last one is actually my favourite experience since it was a school play in which my older brother played one of the patients, at one point stealing the show I might add. This was in the late 90s when my brother and I were going to an American high school in...

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...