Simon's Movie Reviews

  Some Like it Hot (1939) features icons of American cinema at the peak of their talent and has one of the funniest line deliveries ever recorded. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon star as a pair of cross-dressing musicians on the run from the mob while screen legend Marilyn Monroe is the love interest caught in their web of lies. The shoot was apparently very difficult for Monroe, but the end result, directed by Billy Wilders, is a comedy classic. This is a very interesting movie to revisit today. For one thing Marilyn Monroe is having a bit of a moment with that new biopic out on Netflix. Then there’s the fact the two main male characters spend a good part of the movie disguised as women, which was very controversial back at the time and probably still ruffles some feathers today. There is also the question of whether the movie’s jokes still work after over 60 decades. That depends on the audience, but in 2009 I watched it as part of a film studies course in Vancouver and the class ...

Spartacus (1960) is an interesting movie in Stanley Kubrick's filmography because it doesn’t really feel like a Stanley Kubrick movie. I don’t exactly know why, but his signature style doesn’t seem to be present unlike in classics such as The Shining , A Clockwork Orange , or Dr. Strangelove. It does however feel like one of those big sword-and-sandals epics in which you have British thespians acting as Roman politicians with the occasional big battle sequence. In that respect it is spectacular and features Kirk Douglas at his best as the titular hero. The story of the rebel slave Spartacus has inspired a bloody and sexy TV series (so far unseen by me, but I hear it’s great) and the story behind how it was made is one of those cases of life imitating art. The Bryan Cranston film Trumbo tells how screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was blacklisted in Hollywood during the 1950s for his communist beliefs and had to rebel against the system by writing screenplays for cheap movies under ...