Simon's Movie Reviews

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has often been referred to as the Walt Disney of Japan. I would argue in some cases he is even better than the man who created Mickey Mouse. The animation in his movies are stunning, the characters are humans who deal with real-life emotions and pains, and his stories have mostly no villains. His 1988 classic My Neighbor Totoro checks all those boxes and introduced the world to Miyazaki’s own Mickey Mouse even if this creature is limited to only saying his own name. Think of it as a Pokémon minus the annoyance.  It’s hard to keep track, but I believe the last time I was in theatres to see a movie was in early March. Since then it’s been deep dives into movies I own and everything available on streaming services. This year Netflix got its hands-on Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli movies, which gave me a chance to check My Neighbor Totoro off my watch list. It will probably be a few more weeks at least before we can all go back to theatres, so I highly reco...

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...

The horror movie Suspiria (1977) qualifies as a work of art, albeit a flawed one. It has a vibrant colour palette, very creative shots, and some truly gory scenes of violence that are artfully directed. Directed by the legendary Dario Argento, the movie has a mostly female cast who all take the role of protagonists and antagonists. The problem is some of these women do the smart thing and investigate the strange events at their Italian dance school, while others are reduced to screaming their heads off while the killer is slowly making his/her way towards them. The movie could have a had a worse treatment of its female characters, but also a better one. I listen to horror podcast Shockwaves every week and Suspiria is a movie that will come up every now and then as a point of comparison to other horror films. Plus, the movie was of course remade recently so it came back into the zeitgeist. I haven't gotten around to the remake yet, but the original is available for free ...