Simon's Movie Reviews

Unbreakable (2000) is a movie that is becoming more and more relevant as time goes by. For one thing it is one of the last good movies M. Night Shyamalan made before his career took a pretty steep nose-dive. For another it deals with the idea of super heroes and villains in a world where none of those exist and yet and approaches these concepts while steeped in realism. Nowadays there are at least five super hero movies that come out every year, but Unbreakable still feels fresh and original despite the fact two of its actors are now part of the Marvel and DC movie universe. Early on in his career Shyamalan became known for the twist endings in his movies, and Unbreakable is no exception. Unfortunately it took me 15 years to finally see the whole thing on Netflix and by then the ending had been spoiled just like with The Sixth Sense . Then the same thing happened again this year when Shyamalan released Split in which SPOILER ALERT, Bruce Willis has a cameo at the end. When the n...

A characteristic of a great story is when the person listening to said story keeps asking: “And then what happened?” Throughout Rob Reiner’s classic adventure film The Princess Bride (1987) the young boy (Fred Savage) listening to the story keeps asking the story teller, in this case his grandfather (Peter Falk), not to just to keep on reading, but also to skip the gross kissing parts. What makes The Princess Bride a classic is that you are continuously interested in knowing what is going to happen next, regardless if you are so young you are disgusted by the kissing parts, or old enough to not mind at all. In a post Shrek era the film may seem somewhat quaint today since at times it almost resembles a parody of fairy tales movies. Upon first viewing when it was playing on a movie channel a few years ago, I thought it had a bit of a Mel Brooks vibe given the hero is played by Cary Elwes, also the star of Robin Hood: Men in Tights . However there is a lot more than just comedy ...