Simon's Movie Reviews

  Tom Hanks is often described as America’s dad because of his ability to portray everyday characters with a strong moral center and captivating gravitas. Yet all dads were once children and in one of Hanks’ earliest hits he played a child who wakes up with a grown-up’s body. This concept had been done before and has been done plenty of times since, but Big (1988) directed by Penny Marshal is one of the best executions of such a concept. This being 2020 I am still stuck indoors for most weekends with a lot of time on my hands and access to thousands of hours of content. Disney is on its way to owning every movie in existence, which allowed me to finally watch Big in its entirety. I had seen bits of it before on TV, but now I got to cross off yet another movie from my list during this quarantine year. For anyone else stuck indoors with no way out, you could do a lot worse to spend your time waiting for things to go back to normal. Lots of things have changed since Big came o...

One of the joys of the innocence of childhood is not ever being sure where the line is between reality and fiction. A child who watches a puppet show will believe he is watching a living creature and purposefully ignore the strings being pulled from above. At a certain age in children’s lives there is also little difference between a puppy and a teddy bear, which is what the filmmakers at animation studio Pixar were probably counting on with their early masterpiece Toy Story (1995). Who among us has never played with toys and deep down thought maybe they were having lives of their own once we left the room? I imagine I was not the only kid to be fascinated by the sight of Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks) getting up after his owner Andy (John Morris) got out the bedroom. The biggest problem with computer animation is that it cannot capture the life in a human being’s eyes, but that problem does not apply to toys since they are of course lifeless to begin with. That doesn’t stop us from...

War movies make for great entertainment, but war in real life is horrible. Other than maybe David Ayer’s Fury , no movie proves this point better than Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), which portrayed the horror of World War II so accurately veterans walked out of the theatres because they felt it was too realistic. Prior to this movie Hollywood had made tales of that war filled heroism, humour, and a moderate level of violence. Spielberg’s film may somewhat overdo it with the American heroism, but it certainly doesn’t avoid the violence, and the laughs are very rare. Spielberg has often been the king of summer movies, and Saving Private Ryan was another major hit for him in the summer of 1998. I went to see it in theatres with my parents during a vacation in Quebec City even though this was clearly not a family movie. I believe I was around 12 years old at the time, so there are plenty of images that became seared in my brain, particularly the early carnage of Omah...

Films like Toy Story 2 (1999) are staggering examples of how sometimes the sequel can be just as good, if not superior to the original. That the geniuses at Pixar managed to pull the hat trick again with the third instalment in the series speaks volumes about the talent of their writers. Surprisingly Walt Disney Studios was initially considering releasing the second movie straight-to-video, and the production was apparently very troubled. However director John Lasseter not only salvaged a children’s movie, but also delivered a great movie for all ages. The first Toy Story ended up in the VHS collection my parents dutifully provided for my brother and I, and I loved the idea that toys had their own adventures going on between them. Just like Andy in the films I have been growing up with the release of each film, but was still young enough to go see the sequel in theatres when it came out in the Christmas season of 1999. This was one of the rare times when my family and I went hom...