Simon's Movie Reviews

  One of the most fascinating things about human beings is that, as George Carlin once explained, they were smart enough to invent both napalm and silly putty. Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) perfectly illustrates the ingenuity, insanity, and stupidity of the human race as nuclear Armageddon rears its ugly head. The pilots flying the airplanes that carry the atom bombs are all smart enough to fly their aircrafts, but the people giving them orders are either insane or incompetent. It’s scary stuff, and yet you can’t help but find the humour in the madness. I think I first saw Dr. Strangelove over 15 years ago when it was playing on TV for some Stanley Kubrick retrospective. Despite the fact nowadays the news is constantly saying the world is one bad day away from imploding, I felt like revisiting it and sharing my thoughts. Maybe it’s because I needed some dark humour, maybe it’s available for free on CTV, or ...

The average moviegoer will know Peter Sellers solely for his work in The Pink Panther franchise, but devout film fans will know one of his best performances was in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). Sellers was a performer who could easily inhabit colourful characters, whether that was the bumbling inspector Clouseau or the deranged Dr. Strangelove, but the character of Chance the gardener in Ashby’s film is a person who almost has no personality to speak of. Yet Sellers’ performance and the situations in which the character is plunged ended up making Being There a memorable send off, as it was Sellers’ last film. The reason I know it was his last film is because I learned it from watching his biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers in which he his portrayed by Geoffrey Rush. In that movie, whether it is 100 per cent accurate or not, Sellers pursues the role of Chance in Being There with great enthusiasm because he saw it as chance to prove he could play something other than a...