Simon's Movie Reviews

  Some movies are best watched sober while others might best be enjoyed with a liberal dose of alcohol or possibly hallucinogens. With David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) I strongly suspect drugs might give the viewers a panic attack because they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a hallucination or the actual movie. I watched it while slightly drowsy from a lack of sleep and there were times when I was wondering if I was awake or if my mind was off in dreamland. It got hard to tell. This is the latest movie from Empire magazine’s Greatest Movies list from 2008 that I got to scratch off during my many, many hours spent indoors over the past months. It was not my first time experiencing the unique filmmaking style of David Lynch, and that’s a good thing because otherwise I might not have watched any of his later stuff. Eraserhead felt to me like a bizarre art house film by a young student who clearly didn’t care one bit about convention or pleasing the masses. I must no...

  One of the most fascinating things about human beings is that, as George Carlin once explained, they were smart enough to invent both napalm and silly putty. Stanley Kubrick’s satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) perfectly illustrates the ingenuity, insanity, and stupidity of the human race as nuclear Armageddon rears its ugly head. The pilots flying the airplanes that carry the atom bombs are all smart enough to fly their aircrafts, but the people giving them orders are either insane or incompetent. It’s scary stuff, and yet you can’t help but find the humour in the madness. I think I first saw Dr. Strangelove over 15 years ago when it was playing on TV for some Stanley Kubrick retrospective. Despite the fact nowadays the news is constantly saying the world is one bad day away from imploding, I felt like revisiting it and sharing my thoughts. Maybe it’s because I needed some dark humour, maybe it’s available for free on CTV, or ...

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...