Category Archives: A & E

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

December 24, 2018A & E, Cinema, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

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 …

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.” 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.

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.

The Music of One’s Life | Rhianna, and the ReMixes

December 16, 2018A & E, Diversions, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, Pop Culture, Radio, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

My musical tastes run the gamut: progressive and old-timey country, folk, Americana, lounge, progressive dance, klezmer, world beat, Celtic folk, Japanese pop, trip-hop, orchestral, urban pop, hip hop soul, rhythm and blues, acoustic, dirty bass south, avant-garde, europop, gospel, house music, dream pop, trance, ambient and downtempo, acid jazz, rock ballads, post-Britpop — and with all that, I’m only scratching the surface of the types, styles and genres of music I love which constitute the soundtrack of my life, the various genres of music which you’ll come to hear through this screen in the days, weeks, months and years to come.
Where I am a listener and an appreciator of music, with some background in piano and guitar — long forgotten, alas — my son Jude, a recording engineer and D.J. creates his own complex, layered, multi-dimensional music, electronica for wont of a better word. Jude records under the name Dj Nameless, as has been the case for well more than a decade now.

I love well-produced, textured music, and remixes, of which you’ll be hearing a great deal more in the time to come. Today, a remix by New York-based D.J. Branchez of Rihanna’s 2012 chart topper, Stay. When this song pops up on my iTunes playlist, through my bluetooth headphones, when I’m heading downtown to a movie, the bus crowded, rain pelting down on the bus, the wetness of the day permeating not just the clothing but the very souls of the people around me, the Branchez bootleg remix of Stay simply raises my mood — see if it does the same thing for you.

The Music of One’s Life | Tom Waits | Closing Time +

December 9, 2018A & E, Music, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Pomona, California, Los Angeles county, 1950s, birthplace of songwriter Tom Waits

Thomas Alan Waits was born on the 7th of December in 1949, in Pomona, California, a little town located between the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Valley, situated within Los Angeles County. His father, Jesse Frank Waits — about whom Waits would later say … “he was a tough one, always an outsider” — taught Spanish at a local school and was an alcoholic, while his mother Alma was a housewife and regular church-goer.
Waits was the second of three siblings, having both an older and younger sister, raised (as he’s often said) in a middle-class household, his “a pretty normal childhood”. He attended Jordan Elementary and later on Hilltop High School, where he was bullied. It was at Hilltop, though, where he learned to play the bugle and the guitar, while his father had earlier taught him to play the ukulele. Summers, more often than not, he visited maternal relatives in Gridley or Marysville, both small towns about 50 miles north of Sacramento, in northern California. Waits recalls that it was an uncle’s raspy, gravelly voice that inspired the manner in which he later sang.
In 1959, Waits’ parents separated and his father moved away from the family home; it was a traumatic experience for the 10-year-old boy. Alma took her children and relocated to Chula Vista, a middle-class suburb of San Diego. In Chula Vista, he fronted a rhythm and blues school band, The Systems, where he developed a love of soul singers like Ray Charles, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, as well as country music and Roy Orbison. Later on, Bob Dylan became a catalytic influence, with Waits placing transcriptions of Dylan’s lyrics on his bedroom walls.

Novelist Jack Kerouac listening to the beat of a new generation, where as he wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Excerpted from Kerouac’s 1956 novel, On The Road.

In high school, Waits was a self-described “amateur juvenile delinquent”, interested in “malicious mischief” and breaking the law, a “rebel against the rebels”, as he eschewed the hippie subculture then growing in popularity, inspired instead by the 1950s Beat generation, with a great love for the work of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. In 1968, at age 18, he dropped out of high school.

The Howl, Allen Ginsburg, September 1956

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating …

Waits spent much of the next three years traveling, picking up odd jobs here and there, taking college classes in photography, while all the while pursuing his musical interests, including learning the piano, all of which led to gigs along California’s coast, opening for acts like Tim Buckley, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

Early in 1972, Tom Waits landed a gig at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, where he came to the attention of Herb Cohen, a music impresario, record company executive, music publisher, and personal manager for Linda Ronstadt, Frank Zappa, Buckley, and Odetta, among other artists. Cohen signed Waits to a publishing contract with Troubador Records — it was at Troubador that Waits came to the attention of David Geffen, who gave Waits a recording contract with his Asylum Records, the recording sessions taking place in Hollywood’s Sunset Sound studios, the resulting album titled Closing Time, released in March 1973. The rest, as they say, is history.

In a down period of my life, living in a tiny apartment in Coquitlam, teaching school, my Master’s programme falling apart, and the state of my marriage — if such a thing even existed anymore — undecided at best, I took solace with music from Waits’ 1980 album Blue Valentine, most particularly his version of Leonard Bernstein’s Somewhere, from West Side Story (which, for me, is the definitive version of the song). As you can hear, by this point in his career, Tom Waits had developed his signature raspy and heartrending voice. Both songs remain among my favourites to this day.

Arts Friday | Best Cinema of 2018 | VanCity Theatre

December 7, 2018A & E, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

As occurs each December, Tom Charity — one of the kindest, most thoughtful and erudite men of our acquaintance, a great lover of film and who, as it happens, has long acted as the absolutely superb programmer of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s year-round Festival cinema venue, the Vancity Theatre, once again, this year, for your edification, enjoyment and just plain delight presents the Best of 2018, one time only, year-end, must-see screenings of the very best 2018 cinema had on offer.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Thursday, Dec. 27th, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.

Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times arts critic, writes, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” casts a remarkable spell; it wraps around you, like a delicately scented cashmere shawl woven from music and color and astonishing faces.” Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, with its effortless display of poise, as Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper writes, “Anderson shoots and paces Phantom Thread almost like a 1950s mystery, and there ARE some dark elements of intrigue in the story — but this is not a Hitchcockian tale of lust and betrayal and murder. It’s a fascinating examination of an obsessive-compulsive, maddeningly self-centered, magnificently talented man.” Captivating, unsettling, entrancing.

Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, Friday, December 28th, 8pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Here’s what we wrote about Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace last Friday …

Far and away the strongest and most affecting independent film of 2018, director Debra Granik’s first outing since 2010’s multiple Oscar award nominee, Winter’s Bone (in which Jennifer Lawrence made her début, gaining a Best Actress Oscar nomination), Leave No Trace tracks a father and daughter living precariously off the grid, introducing us to an incandescent 17-year-old Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who lives a tranquil life sheltered with her loving, PTSD suffering father, Ben Foster, in an urban Oregon woodland, in perfect harmony with one another, despite all. Uncompromising, authentic, raw, heartbreaking, brilliant, haunting, full of grace, and riveting throughout, Leave No Trace is a multiple Gotham & Indie Spirit Award nominee — including Best Actor, Supporting Actress, Director and Feature — and a must-see Best of 2018 film screening.

This past week, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie was designated as the National Board of Review’s Breakthrough Performance award winner!

Make sure you catch The Death of Stalin on Saturday, Dec. 29th, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.

This past spring, recently-elected Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick and her husband, renowned actor Garry Chalk, caught a screening of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin at the Fifth Avenue Cinema, and came out of the theatre raving about the film to all who would listen. High praise, indeed, from persons of conscience in our community who cherish film as the critically important art form of our age.
Says New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, “The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs,” Iannucci’s take-no-prisoners directorial style perfect for this blackest of farces, political satire of the first order, and a farcical, frightening and a timely reminder that things could always be worse — which in the time of Trump is going some.

Part of a double bill, Mandy on Saturday, December 29th, 10:10pm, Vancity Theatre.

Says CineVue’s Tom Duggins, “Mandy is not just hideous, hilarious and thrilling — although, it’s all of those and then some — it’s also a meditation on personal grief which loses no poignancy for all its blood-soaked insanity and eye-melting psychedelia.” Not enough praise?
Try this, from the Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov, “Mandy, though, is flat-out orders of magnitude a more emotionally adept and shockingly powerful film in virtually every department, from the dazzlingly insane cinematography and lysergically-inclined production design to what I can only believe is Nicolas Cage’s single best performance to date.”

Multiple award winner, Foxtrot, on Sunday, December 30th, 8pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 74th annual Venice Film Festival, says the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, “Samuel Maoz’s award-winning Israeli film is graced by superb performances, especially from Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler, this gentle, dreamlike but admirably process film offers a devastating portrait that bursts with integrity and tough honesty, even in its most lighthearted moments,” and as the Los Angeles Times’ lead film critic Kenneth Turan writes in his review of Foxtrot, “An intricate, dazzling cinematic dance, Foxtrot goes both deeper in and further out than standard-issue cinema. It’s profound and moving and wild and crazy at the same time, simultaneously telling a specific story and offering an emotional snapshot of a country whose very soul seems to be at risk.”

Paddington 2, on Monday, December 31st at noon (New Year’s Eve!), Vancity Theatre.

Probably the most enthusiastically reviewed film of 2018 — and this from a usually cynical crowd of film critics — here’s just a bit of what’s been written about Paddington 2: “An exquisite reminder of the wondrous things that can happen when a storyteller of boundless imagination avails himself of some rigorous discipline (Justin Chang, L.A. Times); and from Time Out London film critic, Helen O’Hara, “It’s a family adventure that’s the right sort of heartwarming, delivering real human emotion through the medium of a small bear.” Others have written about Paddington 2: exemplary, beguiling, enchanting, whimsical, heartfelt, humane, delightful, heartwarming, and “a sequel that surpasses the superb original.”

First Reformed, on Tuesday, January 1st at 7:45pm (New Year’s Day!), Vancity Theatre.

Perhaps the best reviewed art film of 2018, a comeback film for Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), winner of the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle & Gotham Awards for Best Actor for Ethan Hawke — the prohibitive favourite for a Best Actor Oscar — as well as Best Screenplay for Schrader with both critics’ organizations, critic Godfrey Chesire writing, “A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists,” while Roger Moore in Movie Nation writes, “A powerful, disturbing crisis of faith drama that takes on the raiments of a thriller, and a tour de force for the understated acting of Ethan Hawke.” Not to be missed.

Edge of the Knife (Sgaawaay K’uuna), on Tuesday, January 1st at 10pm, Vancity Theatre.

The first feature film to be spoken entirely in the Haida language, Sgaawaay K’uuna is based on a popular Haida legend, Gaagiid/Gaagiixiid (Wildman), the 19th century set film relating the tale of two families who gather together for their annual Haida Gwaii fishing camp.
A man, Adiits’ii (Tyler York), flees into a forest and transforms into a Gaagiid/Gaagiixiid (Wildman) after experiencing a tragedy. Throughout, Sgaawaay K’uuna offers mythic, human scale storytelling, where every life is sacred and no one is beyond redemption, as riveting a tale of survival and forgiveness as you’ll see this year, or any other year.
Sgaaway K’uuna, or Edge of the Knife is derived from the Haida saying: ‘The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife; as you go along, you have to be careful or you will fall off one side or the other.’

Sorry to Bother You, on Wednesday, January 2nd at 8:25pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

One the best reviewed comedies of the summer of 2018, Sorry to Bother You offers a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian speculative fiction, and inspired/demented midnight-movie Silicon Valley satire — it’s also as funny and as caustic as hell. Oh, and did we say that Boots Riley’s début feature film is also a welcome hand grenade of subversive power that is all at once incendiary, hilarious, alarming, anti-capitalist, infectious, absurdist and provocative? Gosh, I think we just did.

Support the Girls, on Thursday, January 3rd at 8:25pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Saving the best for last, writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s heart-of-gold film offers a fresh perspective on the lives of marginalized people, in a story about sex, race, class, and age, all without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing, even given its winking/earnest double entendre of a title.
Here’s what respected film critic John Anderson had to say in the Wall Street Journal …

The unlikely, bittersweet, bristling comedy Support the Girls is easily one of the best films of the year, and the most sympathetic to women, despite having been made by a man. How can this be? Luckily, Andrew Bujalski’s remarkable movie — with its killer performance by Regina Hall (who just won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nod) is not just about women. It’s about men being idiots. And no one is arguing ownership of that narrative.

Humble, restrained, breezy, heartwarming, never hectoring, delicate, cogent, tender, tough, empathetic, controlled, victorious, tumultuous, brilliant, bracing & utterly phenomenal, you need to see Support the Girls.