Simon's Movie Reviews

When you have a movie where the title is the name of the main character, you can assume a few things off-hand. First, said character is about to encounter a heap of trouble. Second, he will most likely find love, or at least re-deem a relationship. Third, by the end of the movie he will have made some major changes in his life. “Jerry Maguire” follows all of these rules by throwing the life of its protagonist upside down and have try to turn everything right side up. He is like the Coyote in Looney Tunes: if he stops and looks down, he just might realize he is walking on thin air and will fall into a canyon. Sometimes it’s better to keep looking up.  The funny thing is, the first time I watched this movie I didn’t know I was about to fall down a canyon myself. It was in January of 2003, back when I was still living in Chile. In May my parents and I were going to move back to my native Canada, but first, a father-son trip. My father thought it would a great idea for hi...

Take a look at any bubby cop movie that has come out in the past twenty years and odds are it has been influenced by Richard Donner's “Lethal Weapon” franchise. It has all of the necessary elements for that genre: two cops, one white, one black, one is by the book, one breaks all the rules, one is a family man, one is single, one is old, one is young and they both have a weapon of choice. In real life cops investigate, gather evidence, and then arrest all the bad guys at once. Buddy cops investigate, get shot at, find out where the bad guys are hiding and then kill everybody in a massive shoot out while dishing out quips. There are a total of four titles in this franchise and in just about all of them Danny Glover’s character says: “I am getting too old for this shit.” By the fourth one even Mel Gibson was getting too old and everyone knew it. I have seen all of them, but not in chronological order. I saw the second and third on TV and the fourth one on the big screen. Finall...

Quentin Tarantino must be a major annoyance to a lot of film teachers. They say to become good at anything you must first learn from the experts. Tarantino learned a lot before becoming a filmmaker, but from watching the stuff other people had done. It’s the dream of every guy who has ever worked at a video club: I have watched thousands of movies, what if I made one myself? Of course now that video clubs are going out of business we’re not likely to see someone emerge with a similar back story, but if anything he has proved you can watch and learn. With “Kill Bill Vol. 2” Tarantino shows what he learned by watching Westerns and Kung Fu movies, resulting in one of the best revenge movies of the last ten years. By the time Volume 2 came out in early 2004, I was still reeling from having seen Volume one the year before. I must have had a weird facial expression after I left the theatre because my brother had looked at me and said: “You’re not going to go see the sequel aren’t you?” ...

You know you have a cult hit on your hands when a movie inspires fashion. Walk into a rock or a Goth clothing store and odds are you will find hats or t-shirts with motifs from Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Leave it to that Vincent Price obsessed director to come up with a movie where the monstrous citizens of Halloween Town take over Christmas. Each of his creations are animated not by computer but via stop-motion, the process in which objects are moved inch by inch and then recorded to give the illusion that inanimate objects are moving by themselves. It also works as a musical, with music and lyrics provided by long-time Burton collaborator Danny Elfman. Released in October of 1993 as “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas,” despite being directed by Henry Selick, the film worried Disney executives because of it might be too scary for young children. I guess my parents thought the same thing since I had to discover that nightmare by myself. It wasn’t too...

Among the great partnerships between actors and directors you can count Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, John Wayne and John Ford, and my personal favourite, Kurt Russell and John Carpenter. Together they made an Elvis Pressley biography, a horror movie (“The Thing”), and a post-apocalyptic action movie (“Escape from New York”). With “Big Trouble in Little China” (1986) they tried a mash-up of three genres: comedy, martial arts, and action. The result is a blend of Chinese legends, monsters, kung fu fighting, and Kurt Russell trading quips with Kim Cattrall in the San Francisco underworld. Man, movies were crazy in the 80s. I saw this particular genre mix back in 2009 while spending the summer in Vancouver as a summer student. Wonderful beaches, but since I only had three courses and didn’t know a lot of people in town I had a lot of free evenings. Always count on iTunes to have a large variety of titles at low prices if you want some home entertainment. Rather appropr...

For my personal taste, most horror movies today have a lot of gore, but little suspense. In 1982, horror master John Carpenter made “The Thing,” a frightening story that had a lot of gore, very suspenseful scenes, a scary setting and memorable characters. This being October and the weekend when the prequel to Carpenter’s version is released, it seems like an ideal time to revisit the 1982 version. The first time I saw this movie was in a basement, by myself, during one of those horror marathons they have on the Space channel during Halloween. The only thing missing was a rainstorm outside and scratching sound on my bedroom windows.  It’s one of those movies that are scary to watch by yourself, but of you watch with other people it’s kind of funny. When I watched it as part of a double bill at the film club at my university (with David Cronenberg’s “The Fly”) we would laugh at some of the film’s more shocking moments, and also at the somewhat dated special effects. My ideal scena...

Among the dozens of comic-book movies that have come out in the past twelve years, “X2: X-Men United” is one of the best of the bunch. It has awesome special effects, an army of original characters, a menacing villain, and a strong plot. Like all of the movies in this particular franchise, it touches on themes such as racism, civil rights, and fear of the unknown. Only instead of people of different skin colour, it is people with mutant abilities who are being persecuted by fearful government agencies. Cheesy, but it makes great action scenes.   Ideally I should have seen a big comic-book movie like this with friends my age at some major multiplex in Canada. Instead when it came out in 2003 I was still living in Santiago, Chile, and on that particular occasion my dad wanted to spend some more time with me since he was home from work. I am the movie geek, so I get to pick the movie. Unfortunately, during the previews he asks me if this is a spy movie, meaning h...