Simon's Movie Reviews

Between the grim realistic tone of Man of Steel and the ever-growing scale of the Marvel movies, Richard Donner’s Superman The Movie (1978) seems somewhat quaint by today’s standards. When this first major comic book movie came out nobody batted an eye at an actor wearing blue tights, and talking about standing for truth, justice, and the American way. Now costume designers try to make “realistic costumes” for a man who can fly, and it is not politically correct to stand for the American way when you have to worry about pleasing overseas audiences. Still, you have to give credit to Donner for being the first director to launch a successful movie in this genre leading to the new age of comic book movies in which we now live. Prior to seeing Superman’s first movie I had never read any of his comic books or seen any of the TV shows. I grew up in a French-Canadian household, so I mostly read Tintin and Astérix, who have also had their days on the big screen. I first saw Superman The M...

If you are ever flipping channels and you start watching a film that has already started, it shouldn’t take you too long to realize you are watching a Wes Anderson film. Rushmore (1998), his second feature film, has him finding his groove. It is filled with his signature symmetrical compositions, flat space camera moves, quirky and dry humour, and beautiful art direction. It is also Anderson’s first collaboration with the great Bill Murray, with whom he would work again on every one of his movies. Could there be an alternate universe in which these two have worked on Ghostbusters 3 ? The first Wes Anderson movie I ever saw was his third, The Royal Tenenbaums , which can be a bit jarring if you are not used to his style. Everyone can agree he has topped himself with 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel by not only delivering a beautiful and funny film, but showing us there is a great comedian within the master of villains that is Ralph Fiennes. Since Rushmore is set in a school ther...

Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s City of God (2002) has been compared to Goodfellas since both films deal with criminal organizations, but the crimes committed in the Brazilian film are much more chaotic, and in a way much more horrible. In fact, while Martin Scorsese’s crime masterpiece showed how the Italian-American mob handled crime like a business, City of God illustrates how crime in the impoverished favelas of the beautiful Rio de Janeiro is not “organized” so much as loosely controlled chaos. It is a scattering look at the underbelly of paradise, and leaves you shaken upon first viewing. Having lived in South America for quite a few years in the mid-90s, I had a rough idea of what favelas look like, but was lucky to have only seen them from afar. I never saw violence remotely resembling what is depicted in the film, but I have seen levels of poverty that make me grateful to live anywhere in Canada. If you think your city is bad because it’s too small or polluted, the...

Films like Toy Story 2 (1999) are staggering examples of how sometimes the sequel can be just as good, if not superior to the original. That the geniuses at Pixar managed to pull the hat trick again with the third instalment in the series speaks volumes about the talent of their writers. Surprisingly Walt Disney Studios was initially considering releasing the second movie straight-to-video, and the production was apparently very troubled. However director John Lasseter not only salvaged a children’s movie, but also delivered a great movie for all ages. The first Toy Story ended up in the VHS collection my parents dutifully provided for my brother and I, and I loved the idea that toys had their own adventures going on between them. Just like Andy in the films I have been growing up with the release of each film, but was still young enough to go see the sequel in theatres when it came out in the Christmas season of 1999. This was one of the rare times when my family and I went hom...

Courtroom dramas make for great movies, and even though the trial does not occupy the majority of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) it is one of the best trials in cinema. Especially significant is its landmark racial element. By having one of the greatest actors of all time, Gregory Peck, play a white lawyer in 1930s Alabama defending a black man accused of rapping a white teenage girl, it daringly indicated that things were changing in America. Before the classic movie there was of course the classic book by Harper Lee, which is one of the books all students must read in English class. I certainly had to read it when I was at an American high school while living in Chile, and I liked it a lot better than Catcher in the Rye . To anyone who disagrees with that I have only one question: where is the movie adaptation of Catcher in the Rye ? Lord of the Flies has children going feral and fighting one another, but that story has been adapted twice. Although I read the book and watch...

“Do I feel lucky? Well do you punk?” You know a movie is iconic when one of its lines of dialogue still sounds just as badass over 40 years later. Dirty Harry (1971), directed by Don Siegel, cemented Clint Eastwood’s status as a movie star after he had conquered the Western genre in the 1960s with Sergio Leone. As San Francisco Detective Harry Callahan he plays somewhat of a modern gunslinger, taking out bad guys with a .44 magnum revolver, and often working outside the bounds of the law in the process. He may not be a model for real-life cop, but Callahan served as the template for hard-boiled cops for decades to come. Eastwood’s characterization and dialogue from the film has been so ingrained in pop culture I had a rough idea of who Harry Callahan was long before ever seeing Dirty Harry . Jim Carrey parodies the “feel lucky” speech in The Mask (1993) and in the 90s I would watch the Lethal Weapon movies, which essentially had Mel Gibson playing a modern-day Harry Callahan. T...

Paths of Glory (1957), one of the many great films by the iconic Stanley Kubrick, is somewhat of a lesser-known entry in his filmmography, but in a way it is as violent as Full Metal Jacket (1987). Due to its portrayal of the French military it was not shown in France until 1975, which is unfair since the actions depicted could have been those of any army that fought in World War I. Wars are generally insane, but that particular war holds a special place in the pantheon of madness for employing trench warfare, which effectively turned battlefields into killing fields for all soldiers. As it is one of the few movies to portray historical events in a boldly accurate way, despite having American actors play French characters, I got to see Paths of Glory in a high school history class during my last year in Chile in 2002. I had a pretty good teacher who held an interesting debate after the end credits to see which officer was most at fault. It is a conversation that could yield a ...