All posts by Raymond Tomlin

About Raymond Tomlin

Raymond Tomlin is a veteran journalist and educator who has written frequently on the political realm — municipal, provincial and federal — as well as on cinema, mainstream popular culture, the arts, and technology.

Decision Canada | Resurrection of Canadian Poli | Values

Decision Canada 2019 Federal Election

Six months from today, Canadian voters will go to the polls in the 43rd Canadian general election, to elect 338 Members of Parliament to Ottawa. As is the case in every election, our democracy and most cherished values will be very much on the line in the late evening of Monday, October 21st.
On this Easter Sunday, when according to the Christian faith God raised Jesus from the dead after his crucifixion, in a Sunday morning resurrection, the 43rd Canadian general election, too, is very much about resurrection.
Will Andrew Scheer’s right-of-centre Conservative party be resurrected, once again allowing the Conservatives to come to life as the governing party of Canada? Will Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party, having suffered the poor misfortunes of the Jody Wilson-Raybound ‘scandal’ be resurrected in time for the October 21st general election, and find themselves given new life after having suffered an unrelenting death spiral these past months?
Will Jagmeet Singh resurrect the federal New Democratic Party from their 42-seat position in Parliament, and bring the party a renewed vibrancy and new life? And what of Elizabeth May, Canada’s one-seat Green Party of Canada leader — with the advent of a Peter Bevan-Baker led PEI Green party government possibly in the offing this upcoming Tuesday evening, and given a vibrant and effective Green Party caucus in Victoria and a poll topping Green Party contingent in Vancouver civic government, on the evening of October 21st will Ms. May be joined by a half dozen or more of her Green Party colleagues, resurrecting grassroots democracy in Canada?
Over the course of the next six months, VanRamblings will delve into the issues that will help determine the 43rd Parliament of Canada, and whither our democracy — although, truth to tell, we also intend to write about our civic and provincial governance, as well as provide idiosyncratic coverage of the arts, the stories of our life, and during the course of the year our cancer journey, and how we find ourselves once again present and accounted for.
VanRamblings’ plan is to write daily through the end of June, addressing any number of topics that interest us, while cutting back our publishing scheduled somewhat during July and August, while once again ramping up our federal election coverage following Monday, September 2nd Labour Day.
We hope to see you back here often. We’ll be looking for you tomorrow.

2019: The Year of Living Ferociously | Fight Back!

2019: The Year of Living Ferociously | Change is on Its Way

ferocious
Definition:
a raging of the soul, living with fierceness, determination, gravity, deliberate intention and intensity.

And so it will be in 2019, a year of progressive change unlike any other in a generation, across Canada, in British Columbia, in our little burgh by the sea, in the United States, across Europe and across the globe.
Make no mistake, though, necessary progressive change for the better will not come should we fail to band together to fight the forces of regression.

Abacus poll. Top issue in the 2019 Canadian federal election

  • Justin Trudeau has said that the 2019 federal election will be the ugliest in Canadian history. Make no mistake, Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer will make it so — aided by Maxime Bernier, the leader of the so-called People’s Party of Canada, who will force the Conservatives further to the right — focusing as former Prime Minister Stephen Harper did on “fear of the other”, as Trump has done in the United States, demonizing the Muslim population and “illegal immigrants”. According to a recent Angus Reid poll, two-thirds of Canadians believe the influx of asylum seekers into Canada is a “crisis”, with 84% of Canadians who voted for the Conservative Party of Canada of the belief that “there are too many people claiming asylum and that Canada is ‘too generous’ toward them;”

  • In British Columbia, voting in the Nanaimo by-election to replace former BC NDP MLA Leonard Krog (who was elected Mayor of Nanaimo this past November) starts today. In late January, it’s a neck-and-neck race, with B.C Liberal candidate Tony Harris focusing on the botched roll-out of the government’s Speculation and Vacancy Tax, which forces every British Columbia homeowner to register their home with the government — failure to do so could result in a payout of thousands of dollars for unsuspecting, unregistered homeowners. If Harris wins, we’re looking at a late winter / early spring B.C. election, which bodes ill for any progressively-minded British Columbian & a return to the bad old days;
  • In Vancouver, we’re sitting pretty, with a largely progressive City Council (notice the number of unanimous or near-unanimous progressive votes — on transit, affordable housing, 58 West Hastings, a renter’s office, our current climate emergency, and much, much more). The success of our City Council, though, is almost wholly dependent on a federal Liberal government, complemented by a provincial NDP government — which, for instance, have set aside $52 billion dollars on the affordable housing file alone, monies which would most assuredly be withdrawn by a right-of-centre / “the market is always right” do-nothing Conservative government, and their B.C. kin, Andrew Wilkinson and the B.C. Liberals.

Closer to home for me will be the fight in which I engage throughout 2019 against the forces of repression, intolerance, despotism, racism, homo-and-transphobia and hatred of “the other” that has defined that portion of my life, resident in the housing co-operative where I have dwelled for 35 years.
2019 is the year to fight back, to demand better, to organize, to recognize that — as is evident in the time of Trump across the United States, and across Europe — that in 2019 all of us are in for the fight of our lives.

Christmas to New Year’s The Busiest Film Week of the Year

Holiday Season Movies to See Over the Christmas Break

The week of Christmas to New Year’s is the biggest box office film week of the year. More people go to the movies on Christmas Day through New Year’s Eve than attend films in the entire months of April and September.
In that one week last year, box office topped $500 million dollars, every seat was sold out, the line-ups were long, and chances are that if you didn’t purchase your ticket online in advance, you weren’t going to find a seat in the theatre for the movie you wanted to see. Count on the same in 2018.
The question remains, what to go and see at the theatre? Many people rely on Rotten Tomatoes, the film critic review aggregation site, although many others prefer MetaCritic, given that the site features only the most erudite, professional and trusted film critics on their better curated aggregation site.

Rotten Tomatoes: Top Movies on the Weekend Before Christmas 2018

Box office on the weekend before Christmas looked like this …

Box Office on the weekend before Christmas 2018

Okay, okay, enough of this folderol. Time to get on with why you’re here perusing VanRamblings today. Let’s start with …

Currently sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, the latest film from 2018 Best Picture Oscar award winner (Moonlight), Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk, here’s what The Telegraph’s lead film critic Tim Robey has to say: “If proof were needed that Barry Jenkins’s directing achievement was far from a one-off, it pulses and dances through every sequence of his follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk, in all its gorgeous romantic melancholy and sublimated outrage.” 5-stars Opens Christmas Day.

Although reviews for the new film from Adam McKay (The Big Short) are decidedly mixed, with a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, USA Today’s Brian Truitt writes about Vice, “Exquisitely crafted … It’s a strange little amalgamation that totally works: a vicious Shakespearean satire about power-hungry mind-sets, stealth corruption, American ambition and the current state of divided affairs in America, but also a quasi-fictional go-for-broke biopic about a political leader we really don’t know at all.”
Lots of Oscar buzz, though, most particularly for Christian Bale and Amy Adams, and even if it’s revisionist history — painting a far too rosy picture of the Bush administration — the film looks like fun. In the era of Trump, we need all the fun we can get. In this case, Vice may be just the ticket.

Here’s what the critics have to say about Bumblebee

Bumblebee is, again and easily, the best Transformers movie released to date. Heck, it’s probably the only genuinely good Transformers movie, with nary a caveat to be found. But it’s also a lively and earnest 1980s nostalgia trip, made with affection for the era and its characters and its soundtracks and its storytelling styles and, yes, even its toys.

What Bumblebee does best is remember that this is a franchise for the young, and embrace that fact without any shame while also still delivering on the action. There’s no self-importance, no grafting of ultra-patriotism and too-dense mythology onto what should be a simple narrative.

There’s a lot to like here, particularly Hailee Steinfeld’s performance.

Box office the weekend before Christmas doesn’t presage how a movie will do Christmas week: here’s betting that Bumblebee triumphs. Doesn’t really matter, though: Bumblebee’s foreign box office will easy double or triple the domestic, North American box office. Bumblebee seems recommendable.

With Shoplifters, Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values & bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems, proving that Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Winner of the Palme d’or at Cannes this year, probable Best Foreign Language Oscar winner, currently playing at Cineplex International Village.
Note should be made that with Shoplifters, Kore-eda works in a beautiful register that feels both detailed and genuine at the same time, allowing us to get to know these characters so deeply that it is heart-wrenching, the film wise and insightful always, delicate, modest, skillful, compassionate, piercingly intelligent, poignant, memorable, and unexpectedly powerful.

Best of 2018 at VIFF's Vancity Theatre

Now, I’ve already written about the Best of 2018 at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre, the comfiest, friendliest and most welcoming cinema in Vancouver, this superlative year-end series programmed by the peerless Tom Charity. The 10 films in the series start their run on Wednesday, December 27th, and concludes eight glorious days later on Thursday, January 3rd. Not to be missed. See ya at the Vancity.
For more info on VIFF’s Best of 2018 series just click on the links.

And, oh yeah — don’t forget: Alfonso Cuarón’s probable Best Picture Oscar winner, Roma, continues to play to sold-out houses each day, exclusively at the Vancity Theatre. Gorgeous and moving, and also not to be missed.

And, finally, there’s this, an amalgam of films screening around Vancouver, or set to come to the Vancity, or opening near you, during the course of the next month, including a few Best Foreign Language Oscar nominees.