Simon's Movie Reviews

The United-States has Pixar and Disney, but Japan has Studio Ghibli. Its founder Hayao Miyazaki has directed many of its most successful titles, including 2001’s “Spirited Away” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and became the highest grossing film in Japan. Like many of the studio’s greatest hits, it uses hand-drawn animation to create a fantasy world filled with creatures you can only dream of and then animate. The title is appropriate, as “Spirited Away” takes you for a ride into a spirit world. I first saw this Ghibli creation in January of 2012, as my brother had received it for Christmas. That’s pretty much how it has been going during Christmastime for the past few years in my family: we buy each other movies or TV shows, watch a few in the days after December 25 and then we move on into the new year. It’s nice to take a few hours out of the busy holiday season to just sit in front of the television and watch a movie as a family, even if we do...

The writers at Pixar have this ability to take ordinary concepts or objects and turn them upside down. What if children’s toys sprang to life when you left the room? What if cars could talk? With “Monsters, Inc.” (2001) they asked the question “what if the monsters in your closet were average guys trying to make a living?” I first saw Pixar’s fourth film while living in Lima, Peru, with my brother and my mom. American movies in South America are usually released in English with Spanish subtitles, but they make an exception for kids’ movies and dub them in Spanish. I would have preferred to hear the voices of John Goodman and Steve Buscemi, but as with all Pixar films this is more about story and visuals than dialogue. Besides, once they get to that scene where Mike and Sully enter the room with a million doors, who cares what language they speak? Only one word comes to mind: WOW! In the city of Monstropolis, power is generated by capturing the screams of little ch...

When people hear the name “Martin Scorsese” the first thing they tend to think of is gangster movies. Making gems such as “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “The Departed” will do that. Apart from the gangster element, all of these movies have another thing in common: kick-ass soundtracks. Having lived through the 1960s, Scorsese knows good music, which he has shown in documentaries such as “Shine a Light,” “The Blues” and “The Last Waltz.” That last one was shot in 1978 and features the final concert of The Band who were accompanied on stage by performers such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Ringo Starr. Here is a movie for lovers of rock history and great filmmaking. The original plan was for me to watch this great rock doc during one of the showings of the film club in the university of Sherbrooke in 2010. It would have been perfect since it was supposed to be the last evening. We would watch “The Last Waltz” before waltzing out of universit...

The movie with the iconic ending where Charlton Heston damns them to hell, the original “Planet of the Apes” (1968) was one of the first science-fiction franchises of the second half of the 20 th century. It started with one movie featuring talking apes and then spawned four sequels, two TV series, a Tim Burton remake and then a re-energized prequel with the ever-versatile James Franco. Not bad for a film with a very Z-movie concept and a Twilight Zone ending. Seeing the original Franklin J. Schaffner version for the first time was like seeing a dusty old blueprint for a building I had seen many times before. I had seen the Tim Burton remake while living in Peru, and while there I also saw one of the sequels, “Escape from the Planet of the Apes,” on TV. Unfortunately, I had also already seen the big twist ending of the original movie when the American Film Institute did one of their specials on great movies. They should really stop giving the ending away when they re-e...

The proof that there are no movie genres British filmmaker Danny Boyle will not tackle, his science-fiction thriller “Sunshine” aims to go where no sci-fi movie has gone before: the inside of the sun. Impossible? Most likely, but then again that is why they attach the word “fiction” to science. This is a movie to watch on a cold winter afternoon, which is exactly what I ended up doing when I first saw it. I missed out on this film when it first came out in 2007, so I had to make-do and rent the DVD. This was back when I was living off campus at the university of Sherbrooke, in Québec. No roommates, so this was just me in my tiny apartment during one of my days off, unless I would go to the campus’ film club that specialized in cult movies. Seeing “Sunshine” for the first time, I thought it could eventually end up on a cult film list. Like most outer space adventures, “Sunshine” is set on a single ship with crewmembers who have to learn to live with each other for mo...

One of the movies that re-defined independent cinema in the United-States during the early 1990s, “Clerks” marked the arrival of New Jersey filmmaker Kevin Smith. It also marked a new trend in movies geared towards large audiences: characters that actually speak the way ordinary people talk. The characters in Quentin Tarantino films often riff on pop culture, but that is usually before they end up shooting someone. The characters in Kevin Smith movies also riff on pop culture, but they hold ordinary jobs in the real world. In his 1994 feature film debut, his characters hold the most ordinary jobs in the western world: clerks at a mini-mart. I was way too young to see this movie when it first came out, but I eventually ended up watching in what is, lets face it, the ideal location to watch a movie like this: my mom’s basement with my older brother. Of course my mom had zero interest in this movie, but my brother and I laughed our ass off and had a great time. I am pretty...

One of the few spies to give James Bond a run for his money, Jason Bourne re-shaped Matt Damon’s career and gave the world one of the best action franchises of the last decade. Although more a hyperkinetic assassin than an actual spy, Bourne can slip in and out of a place without getting noticed, disarm a roomful of armed men and walk out of deadly car chases with no more than a slight limp. His adventures have taken him from France to England, from India to Russia and to a (presumably) last stop in New York. The more impressive trait is that he can do all this while suffering from brain damage that has left him with amnesia. If I recall correctly, I saw the first Bourne adventure, “The Bourne Identity,” while flying somewhere over the Andes. This first chapter, directed by Doug Liman, first came out in 2002 and back then I was living in Santiago, Chile. Every time my parents and I would fly home to Québec it would take approximately ten hours by airplane, so that is a ...