Simon's Movie Reviews

  Heat (1995) is a crime movie in which screen legends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro shared the screen for the first time. That alone should be good enough to guarantee near perfection. Fortunately, this is also a Michael Mann movie featuring some crackling dialogue and action choreography that makes the audience feel like they are right in the streets amid the gunfight. The result is a movie so good it influenced a slew of other crime movies in its wake, including Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight . My first viewing of Heat was sometime in the mid-2000s when I watched it the old-fashioned way by renting it from the video store. I did not know much about it other than it was a crime movie starring Pacino and DeNiro, and upon first viewing I thought there were a few lengthy moments in between the action scenes. Having recently viewed it again, I have more appreciation for the scenes when the bullets aren’t flying because those quieter scenes do a good job of establishing the cha...

When Todd Phillips’ Joker shook the world of comic book movies in 2019 (which is now starting to feel like a decade ago) two films kept being cited as influences: Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1983). Having already seen the violent Taxi Driver years ago I could see how that made sense and was curious to see how The King of Comedy also influenced the origin story of the Clown Prince of Crime. This week Amazon helped me fill in that cinematic blind spot, as I found yet another way to pass time indoors during this cold winter pandemic. Both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy were directed by Martin Scorsese, star Robert De Niro as a loner living in New York City, and play with perceptions of reality. However, while Taxi Driver proved to be hit, The King of Comedy earned praises but not as much box-office success. Perhaps it is because it does not have as much violence as Taxi Driver or memorable lines, but I would venture it is because this movie was ahead of its time. Th...

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...

Dystopian movies from the 1980s are a funny thing since we now live in the future of those movies and if you look at the news for more than five minutes it will feel as though we are one bad day away from being into a dystopia. On the plus side, if it ends up looking like the dystopia portrayed in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) at least we will have lovely architecture to look at while the government is busy telling us how to think. This might not be a movie that will cheer you up, but the production design is amazing, the performances are great throughout, and you get to see Robert DeNiro play a maintenance man/freedom fighter.   I first saw Brazil as a Terry Gilliam double feature at the Université de Sherbrooke’s movie club paired along with 12 Monkeys around ten years ago. Those two films are similar in that they both feature a rather dour future and, as with most Gilliam movies, incredibly intricate sets. However the dystopian future in Brazil is somewhat scarier than th...

Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) is somewhat of an anomaly in the director's repertoire. The only one of his films to be based on a novel, it is relatively low on action, and it is not one of his most financial successful endeavours. Some saw it as a step down after he took the world by storm with Pulp Fiction while others rightfully believe it showcases some of his best work. It shows QT doesn’t need buckets of blood to make good entertainment. Sometimes it can be all about the story. I first saw Jackie Brown sometime after Kill Bill had come out, which in contrast goes full-tilt boogie in terms of violence. By then I was hooked on his filmmaking and was very enticed every time I would see the cover for the Special Edition DVD at HMV. I wasn’t too familiar with Pam Grier since she rose to fame in the 1970s, but if I see Robert De Niro, Samuel L. Jackson, and Michael Keaton on a poster I take at a sign this is something good. Watching it for the first time I was surp...

Hat-wearing gangsters armed with Tommy guns have been gone for decades, but movies and TV shows about them are as popular as ever. From The Godfather to Boardwalk Empire , stories about bootleggers, hoodlums, mobsters and the cops doing their best to bring them down still fascinate people. Some are based on fact while some are based on legends. Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), working off a script from David Mamet, seems to lean more towards the legend in order to offer more of a spectacle. Understandable, given the movie’s villain, Al Capone, is a legend of crime. As it is a crowd-favourite, I had seen bits and pieces of The Untouchables playing on TV every now and then. I eventually rented the DVD to watch the whole thing with some nifty behind-the-scenes nuggets, something you don’t get today with Netflix and iTunes. It was my little ritual when I was finishing high school in Quebec City if I had nothing to do that weekend. Head to the video store, get one of those ...

Buddy comedies are the result of a good equation. You need two vastly different characters who have to work together, (most of the time against their will), good dialogue and great onscreen chemistry. In the 1980s and 1990s the prime example was Mel Gibson and Danny Glover as two cops in the “Lethal Weapon” franchise, but “Midnight Run” (1988) by Martin Brest achieves the formula just as well, not with cops but with a bounty hunter and his prey. Robert De Niro plays the tough bounty hunter while Charles Grodin is the embezzler he must bring from New York to Los Angeles. That is of course if they survive the trip and each other. I first started watching this movie at a birthday party in Santiago, Chile, back in the mid-90s. I don’t know whose idea that was but it was a weird choice because people started walking out of the room pretty soon. I guess it was a bit too much of a grown up movie for a bunch of ten-year-olds, but I kept it in mind and over the years I rediscovered by re...

Watching Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” (1973) is like taking a look at one of the smaller pyramids of Egypt before the BIG ones were built. Before Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio were working opposite sides of the law in “The Departed,” before Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci were running Vegas in “Casino,” and before Ray Liotta became a gangster in “Goofellas,” Harvey Keitel was trying to survive the mean streets of New York. All the classic elements are there: strong performances, gangsters who are both reckless and conflicted by their choices, and a kick-ass soundtrack by The Rolling Stones. This movie was another entry in the film club I joined while studying at the University of Sherbrooke, where we would watch double features every night in the faculty basement. That week’s programming: a Martin Scorsese double feature starting with “Mean Streets” and ending with, I believe, “Goodfellas.” Appropriate, since “Mean Streets” was the beginning of success for Scorsese, while “...

In 1990 Martin Scorsese made “Goodfellas” one of the definitive movies about organized crimes in the United-States. Along with “The Godfather” trilogy, it provides an impeccable depiction of the gangster lifestyle. Yet, maybe because I saw it first, I find “Casino,” his tale of the mob’s power hold in 1970’s Las Vegas, more entertaining. Both movies are very stylish, have first rate performances by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, provide a detailed look at a criminal organization, and actually make you root for these criminals. “Casino” however, does not only depict a gangster lifestyle, but also depicts the unusual marriage between the mafia and the entertainment industry. De Niro’s character does not only have to juggle his personal life with his criminal life: he also has to juggle in front of the cameras when he gets his own TV show. I first saw this cinematic masterpiece on TV about six years ago. The channel, MPIX, is one of those channels where they show classics o...