Simon's Movie Reviews

A characteristic of a great story is when the person listening to said story keeps asking: “And then what happened?” Throughout Rob Reiner’s classic adventure film The Princess Bride (1987) the young boy (Fred Savage) listening to the story keeps asking the story teller, in this case his grandfather (Peter Falk), not to just to keep on reading, but also to skip the gross kissing parts. What makes The Princess Bride a classic is that you are continuously interested in knowing what is going to happen next, regardless if you are so young you are disgusted by the kissing parts, or old enough to not mind at all. In a post Shrek era the film may seem somewhat quaint today since at times it almost resembles a parody of fairy tales movies. Upon first viewing when it was playing on a movie channel a few years ago, I thought it had a bit of a Mel Brooks vibe given the hero is played by Cary Elwes, also the star of Robin Hood: Men in Tights . However there is a lot more than just comedy ...

A villain you hate to love is a hard thing to come by, but a villain you just plain love is even more of a rarity. Despite being an amoral serial killer who eats his victims, Hannibal Lecter is so charismatic he has become a part of pop culture across four films and a TV show that barred his first name. Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) was the second film to feature the character, but it is the one responsible for making him an icon of cinema thanks to award-winning performances by Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal the Cannibal and Jodie Foster as the object of what passes for his affections. I definitely did my homework on this ghoulish story, having read the book of the same name by Thomas Harris in the late 90s and used it for a book report, much to my teacher’s surprise. Over the years I have read Hannibal the book, seen that movie, watched Anthony Hopkins revisit the role one last time in Red Dragon , and seen Brian Cox first tackle the role in Michael Mann’s Man...

I have noticed that the French have a love-hate relationship with the United States, with the love part generally due to Hollywood. One of the greatest examples of that loving relationship is Breathless (1960) a film directed by French film critic Jean-Luc Godard, starring a character attracted to the film persona of American actor Humphrey Bogart, and a French-speaking American expatriate as his girlfriend. The film’s plot is pretty simplistic, but at the time its use of jump cuts was something entirely new, and Godard’s style actually ended up influencing many American filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, and Robert Altman. This movie is a part of cinema history, but upon first viewing it seemed dated to me. I don’t mean the black and white cinematography, that is objectively gorgeous, but rather the story and characters. The movie was played as a double feature at a film club when I was at the University of Sherbrooke and it seemed to me the rest of the audi...

It’s never fun to get conned, but you have to admit it is loads of fun to see professional con artists at work. Whereas today any moron with a laptop can exhort money from gullible people by pretending to be a Nigerian prince in need of quick cash in return for a fortune, there was a time when a good con required a team of expert hustlers, hours of preparation, and one devious plan B in case the whole thing went up in flames. George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973) depicts such a con featuring one of the best on-screen duo in movie history: Paul Newman and Robert Redford, reuniting with Hill a few years after working on another classic, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).   When watching a movie about a con job, it is almost as though the filmmakers are the con artists and the audience is the mark. The objective of the screenwriters and the director is to have the con artists in the movie pull off their job without the audience knowing exactly how they are doing it. If the...

Being in a country where you don’t speak the language and most people don’t speak your language is a rather unique experience, which Sofia Coppola perfectly captured in her comedy/drama Lost in Translation (2003). Setting the movie in Japan greatly increases the feeling of isolation the two main characters feel, since at times Japanese culture almost feels like something from another world when compared to western culture. Then again with Donald Trump running for President of the United States this year Japan is starting to look pretty tame as compared to how the world was in 2003. I have not had the chance to travel to Japan, but I spent a good chunk of my teenage years in South America where I had to slowly learn Spanish for everyday use. While watching Lost in Translation I could somewhat identify with the situation of Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an American adrift in Tokyo. The first time you are in a country with a different culture, language, and time zone, there is a lot of...

Some directors try to excel in all genres while others feel very much at home in a particular genre, which is fine especially if that director is Guillermo del Toro. The Mexican writer and director has made action movies, moody dramas, and horror films, yet all of these films could be classified in a way as works of fantasy. His masterpiece, so far, is Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) in which a young girl’s imagination and embrace of the fantastic triumphs over the rigidity of fascism. It is a dark and bloody tale for sure, but also one filled with beautiful images and a commanding performance from its young lead. The movie was released in the fall of 2006 when I was studying at the University of Sherbrooke and unfortunately this was another case when the movie was only available dubbed in French. I always prefer watching movies in their original language, otherwise I feel like I have only paid for half the performances, and I could have perfectly understood the original Spanish track h...

On paper David Fincher’s Seven (1995) sounds like just about every other serial killer movie that came before. You have the senior detective inching his way towards retirement, the hotheaded rookie, and the killer murdering people in the dark streets of the city according to his own twisted logic. Then the movie gets to THAT ending and the answer to the question: “WHAT’S IN THE BOX!?” Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker could have just made a standard serial killer movie with great performances and dark street corners, but by making that uncompromising conclusion they delivered one of the best films of the 1990s. It is a good thing the movie was made before the rise of social media, because the ending might have been spoiled for many viewers. When I rented the movie in the early 2000s I just knew it was a movie about a maniac who kills people according to the seven deadly sins, I knew nothing about the content of a certain box. Therefore it was a genuine surprise for me to se...