Simon's Movie Reviews

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) must be a bit of black sheep for a lot of Western fans. When this genre started out morality was portrayed in a very binary way, with the bad buys wearing black hats and getting shot during an honourable duel by the good guys who were of course wearing white hats. As cinema grew, so did the Western. The line between right and wrong became blurry, especially when Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone introduced Clint Eastwood as a more or less good guy doing bad things to even worse people. However, in Peckinpah’s ultraviolent take on the Western the protagonists are irredeemable bad guys and the people chasing them are definitely not wearing white hats. I’m guessing John Wayne would not have been a fan. We are now almost a year into the global pandemic and in my part of the world things are so bad I’m not even allowed to go in the streets at night. The good news is at-home entertainment is years away from drying up, and I even found yet another way to ...

  Tom Hanks is often described as America’s dad because of his ability to portray everyday characters with a strong moral center and captivating gravitas. Yet all dads were once children and in one of Hanks’ earliest hits he played a child who wakes up with a grown-up’s body. This concept had been done before and has been done plenty of times since, but Big (1988) directed by Penny Marshal is one of the best executions of such a concept. This being 2020 I am still stuck indoors for most weekends with a lot of time on my hands and access to thousands of hours of content. Disney is on its way to owning every movie in existence, which allowed me to finally watch Big in its entirety. I had seen bits of it before on TV, but now I got to cross off yet another movie from my list during this quarantine year. For anyone else stuck indoors with no way out, you could do a lot worse to spend your time waiting for things to go back to normal. Lots of things have changed since Big came o...

  In the Greek myth of Sisyphus, a man is punished by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill only for the boulder to always roll back down whenever he would near the top, thus illustrating futility. In Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) the main character shows the Greeks have nothing on him as he attempts to roll not a boulder but an entire steamer up a hill. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the hill is located in the Amazon jungle, meaning it is covered with plenty of firmly rooted trees. This movie made me think I lack ambition. This was my second viewing of a Werner Herzog movie in the past few weeks, the previous one being The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser . That one focused on one man assimilating into society after growing up in isolation, whereas Fitzcarraldo tells the incredible tale of a man who practically wages war against a jungle. You can’t say Werner Herzog is afraid to scale up, and I was certainly impressed by the effort he put into making this movie. I was al...