Simon's Movie Reviews

  A “Spaghetti Western” is a strange concept on paper, but if well-executed it makes for one epic movie. Somehow an Italian director managed to get American actors to travel all the way to Italy, shoot in some of the warmest areas in Europe to stage the Old West, and reinvented an American movie genre. Sergio Leone is the director best known for this international collaboration, and Clint Eastwood is the American actor who became an icon for his roles in his movies. Their best collaboration is undoubtedly The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1967) which boasts one of the best duels of all times. As the title indicates, this is the tale of three characters. The “Good” is Blondie (Eastwood), who is not that good considering he is a bounty hunter scamming the law during the American Civil War. His scheme is to capture the “Ugly”, a vicious criminal named Tuco (Eli Wallach), collect the bounty, release him right before his hanging, then start all over in a different town. “The Ugly” of ...

“Serenity” is what happens when you give free reigns to Joss Whedon. It is a movie that is cool as can be, a space western featuring a rag tag crew of pirates/mercenaries on the run from an evil empire hell-bent on killing one of their passengers. It features a charismatic lead, strong female characters, witty dialogue, sword fights, fist fights, gun fights, and of course space battles. The crew’s spaceship, Serenity, is of course a pile of junk. Don’t you love underdogs? The movie is based on a TV show that is somewhat of an underdog itself. “Firefly,” premiered on Fox in 2002 and was cancelled after 11 episodes. That would normally have been the end for any show, but then all episodes were released on DVD. Then many people bought them, lots of people wondered why some idiot at Fox cancelled such a fun show, fan clubs were formed, and comic books continued the story. Eventually Joss Whedon thought there was enough support to get the band back together and make a movie. I o...

At his peak, the outlaw Jesse James was the most famous outlaw in America. Brad Pitt is one of the most famous movie stars in the world, so it was a no brainer to cast him as the lead in Andrew Dominik’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” But as the long title says it, this isn’t just about James, but about the smaller man who tried to rise from under his shadow. Like Brad Pitt, James had many admirers, and in the case of Robert Ford, the kind movie stars fear: an obsessive fan with deadly ambitions. I saw this movie as a result of a scriptwriting class at the University of Sherbrooke in 2008. To be honest I didn’t find the teacher to be very knowledgeable. He was telling us about a screenwriters’ strike that happened in the 1980s, but he didn’t even know there had been one that very year. My guess is, he was learning about this stuff just as we were. Still, he mentioned Andrew Dominik’s Jesse James movie a few times, praising the script. That weekend...