Simon's Movie Reviews

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) must be a bit of black sheep for a lot of Western fans. When this genre started out morality was portrayed in a very binary way, with the bad buys wearing black hats and getting shot during an honourable duel by the good guys who were of course wearing white hats. As cinema grew, so did the Western. The line between right and wrong became blurry, especially when Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone introduced Clint Eastwood as a more or less good guy doing bad things to even worse people. However, in Peckinpah’s ultraviolent take on the Western the protagonists are irredeemable bad guys and the people chasing them are definitely not wearing white hats. I’m guessing John Wayne would not have been a fan. We are now almost a year into the global pandemic and in my part of the world things are so bad I’m not even allowed to go in the streets at night. The good news is at-home entertainment is years away from drying up, and I even found yet another way to ...

War by its very definition is a chaotic situation, whereas a prison is a place where chaos is something to be controlled or avoided. Having these two worlds collide raises a lot of moral questions, such as do prison rules still apply when war is raging outside the walls? David Lean’s classic The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) explores these questions and other complex ones on a grand scale while being highly entertaining. It is the sort of epic you rarely see now and that must have been quite something to behold on the big screen. Like the rest of the planet I can’t go out to see anything on the big screen right now, unless I can find a drive-through theater in the area. However, there are plenty of apps that give me access to free movies with commercial breaks, including Lean’s epic. With a running time of 161 minutes it consumes a big chunk of your afternoon, but I was never bored. With all the time we are spending indoors nowadays, why not spend some of those hours watchi...

Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a true piece of cinema history. For one thing it is classic film noir, a genre rarely seen nowadays, and for another the cast if filled with actors and key players from a bygone era. It also helps that the plot is highly memorable to the point that 50 years later it has been parodied or referenced by shows such as Twin Peaks and even Tiny Toon Adventures . That’s a sign of cultural significance as far as I am concerned. The ideal place to watch this movie would be in a classroom on cinema history, and if I recall well that is exactly what I did around nine years ago in Vancouver. The course was Hollywood cinema 1930-1960, a perfect time frame for Sunset Boulevard since it features cameos by Buster Keaton and other actors of the silent films that ran in the 1930s, and iconic director Cecil B. DeMille, who is responsible for a few classics himself. The movie’s lead female character is movie star from the bygone era of the silent films, bu...