Category Archives: A & E

Arts Friday | An Indie Film Preview for the Month of June

June 1, 2018A & E, Cinema, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Summer Blockbuster Movies Set to Invade Your Local Multiplex

A Multi-Billion Dollar Blockbuster Movie Summer
And, the 2018 Must-See Summer Indie Film Alternatives
With the summer movie season already well underway, starting earlier than ever this year, with the release of Avengers: Infinity War on April 28th, the film racing towards the two billion dollar mark worldwide, faster than any movie ever released, you are about to be brow-beaten with one big Hollywood blockbuster spectacle after another over the next three months.
Hollywood is thrilled, needless to say and Disney in particular as the releasing studio, with the record-breaking success of Avengers: Infinity War, a great start to Hollywood’s summer 2018 movie season, the movie studio heads can be heard murmuring, and a sign of good things to come.
Prospects for warm-weather moviegoing in 2018 are significantly better than they were in 2017, a year most studios and cinema chains like Cineplex would like to forget, with one box office blockbuster after another tanking with patrons, the cavalcade of failures foisted upon us last summer including The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, The Dark Tower, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Baywatch, and The Emoji Movie.
Quite simply, summer 2017 was overburdened with testosterone cinema.
In 2018, though, the situation is looking better, says the president and CEO of Cineplex Entertainment, Ellis Jacob, who in a recent conference call told Canada’s film journalists …

“This summer’s film slate looks particularly strong, offering something for everyone.”

After a 2017 that saw a 9.3% drop off at Cineplex’s box office, a financial circumstance that has yet to abate thus far in 2018, box office tragedy for Cineplex is partially mitigated by the success earlier this year of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Jake Kasdan’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Still, Jacob has more than the usual reason for wanting his prediction of a 2018 big summer box office to come true.
The eight Hollywood titles Jacob predicts will do well this summer …

Ocean’s 8 (June 8), the all-female take on the caper comedy;
Incredibles 2 (June 15), one of Pixar’s best creations makes its way back into the cinema;
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (June 22), the long-awaited re-invention of the franchise;
Ant-Man and the Wasp (July 6), a reprise of the Paul Rudd starring surprise summer 2016 hit;
Skyscraper (July 13), yet another Dwayne Johnson chest-pounder, this one filmed in Vancouver;
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (July 20). Yes, the girls are back, and so are the boys;
Mission: Impossible — Fallout (July 27), another Tom Cruise stunt fest (early reviews are good).

While movie-goers have a tendency to overindulge in popcorn movies during the summer movie season, there are alternatives for adults.

What under-the-radar, low-budget films are set to break out in the month of June, films that will demand your attention, and your box office dollars?

On Chesil Beach (June 1). Opening today at Fifth Avenue Cinema, there couldn’t be a better way to kick off indie June than with Saoirse Ronan’s latest knock-out, On Chesil Beach, an entrancing adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella about a young British couple on their honeymoon in 1962. A lyrical and exquisite film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking, the film and the story possess an intoxicating quality of emotional wonder, just the sort of indie film that you want to have lead off your summer of worthy and rapturous indie cinema

Hereditary (June 8). The most anticipated indie film to be released in June, a film that took Sundance by storm, and a film that seems poised to conquer the summer horror box office, a fitting follow-up to John Krasinski’s low-budget breakout A Quiet Place as one of the year’s best horror films. Filled with chilling images, a powerhouse performance by Toni Collette, and one eerie young girl, Hereditary is sure to terrify audiences, and emerge as an unforgettable and scarifying experience at the movies.

Won’t You Be My Neighbour? (June 8). Morgan Neville’s new documentary about children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, a breakout doc at Sundance 2018, offers sanity in an insane world, one of the most hotly-anticipated films of the summer. And there’s more to come: a Tom Hanks-led biopic called You Are My Friend, that will follow this documentary from Oscar recipient and recent Cannes casualty Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom).
More, from Matt Goldberg, writing for Collider …

I did not expect to cry as much as I did during Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville’s documentary chronicling the life and career of Fred Rogers. As a cretinous youth who preferred the colourful Sesame Street to the staid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it’s only now as an adult that I can fully appreciate what Rogers was doing with his unique TV programme. And yet as Won’t You Be My Neighbor? shows, Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister with a background working alongside child psychologists, lived his values and created something special and enduring as a result. Although the documentary derives a large part of its strength simply from watching Rogers in action, it’s still a moving tribute not only to the individual, but to the kindness and compassion he and his programme embodied.

At Sundance, a standing ovation at the end seemed more for Rogers himself than the film. The image that lingers is a shot of Rogers hunched and cold in a tall field, a lone figure fighting the wind. He couldn’t control life’s storms. But he’d show people how to endure them.

Leave No Trace (June 29). The new film from director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) means something unexpected and thoughtfully crafted that you won’t want to miss. With quietly wrenching performances from Ben Foster, as a PTSD-afflicted vet, and newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, as his estranged daughter, this one’s a keeper. The last time Granik found a teenage actress to anchor her film it was Jennifer Lawrence. Early reviews indicate she’s found another potential breakout talent with the New Zealand-born McKenzie, the director’s latest a mesmerizing tale of life on the margins, a stunner, poignant, delicate, grim and captivating.
If you haven’t seen two other knockout indie films playing this week at Tinselown, get thee on down to Cineplex International Village now, to see …

Disobedience (Grade: B+). A gorgeously well-wrought film, with outstanding performances from Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, with Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola giving the performances of their lives, Disobedience marks the North American English language début of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who picked up the Best Foreign Language Oscar just three months ago for his breakout transgender tale, A Fantastic Woman. A melancholy story involving an often surprising yet deeply felt romantic triangle, from beginning to end Disobedience exerts a powerful grip on the viewer, offering a love story, as beautiful as it is devastating.

RBG (Grade: A+). Must, must, must viewing — if you have a daughter age nine or older, if you’re a young woman with agency attending secondary school, college, university or striking out on your own, if you’re a woman who during the course of her life has lived as a feminist, whether quietly or as a community activist, run right out to the theatre right now, don’t wait, because RBG is essential viewing, a certain nominee for a Best Documentary Oscar, and a film that will see you leaving the theatre on a high, the likes of which you won’t have experienced in years! Go, now.
At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a breathtaking legal legacy while in recent years becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But without a definitive Ginsburg biography, the unique personal journey of this diminutive, quiet warrior’s rise to the highest court in the United States has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans — until now.
Funny, sweet-natured, offering a love story for the ages, a women’s movement history lesson that will reside in you for years to come, RBG offers an unapologetic valentine to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but a sharp and spiky one too, in a fist-pumping, crowd-pleasing documentary that will have you talking with your friends and family for hours afterwards, as I witnessed at a screening last night, when groups of animated filmgoers looked for the nearest coffee shop to continue their passionate discussion of the feminist movement and women’s history and the monumental formal written legacy of a clear-eyed force of nature, the badass but even-tempered Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a figure of immense power in bringing about all that we now seem to take for granted in how women lead their lives, when only 40 short years ago, when many women, far, far too many women, were viewed and lived their lives merely as chattel, the powerless appendages of unremarkable, unforgiving men.
RBG excavates the truth buried below the surface in the late 20th century women’s movement: Ginsburg isn’t just an 85-year-old cultural icon, she’s also an 85-year-old cultural icon who spent a lifetime opting for litigating over protest, for painstaking incremental legal work that took years to bear fruit, who still feels more comfortable in the world of words and text than in the world of fame and notoriety. RBG captures that paradox beautifully.

Indie Cinema, The Summer and the Salvation of Good Movies

April 27, 2018A & E, Cinema, Jude and Megan, Pop Culture, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

VanRamblings has always loved the cinema, from the time we held our younger sister’s hand to keep her safe, while on our way to the Grandview Theatre, just south of 1st Avenue on Commercial Drive on the east side of the street, every Saturday in every month throughout 1955 until near the end of August in 1958, when our family moved to Edmonton, where our movie-going regimen was kept up — alone this time, on the bus at the age of eight heading downtown during the most unforgiving of 40-below winter nights cascading towards the Rialto Theatre to see the latest Hayley Mills film, for we were in love with Hayley Mills and never, ever missed one of her films … through to the mid-1960s when we were once again resident on Vancouver’s eastside, just north of Semlin Drive & 1st Avenue, in the neighbourhood where we were raised, and where we lived for most of our first 18 years of life, through until … now, to this day, when this year we celebrate 50 years as a published film critic, and ardent lover of film.

Not for us, the big blockbuster films that have dominated movie landscapes for most of the past three decades. No, we’re a ‘window on the world’ foreign film aficionado, as Rocky Mountaineer President and founder Peter Armstrong will tell you if you ask him, and we love small, lower-budget independent films to near distraction, and we love reading and writing about the film festivals that dot the cultural landscape throughout the year, from January’s Sundance Film Festival — founded by Robert Redford in Salt Lake City in August 1978 — to the Berlin “Berlinale” Film Festival in February, to March’s annual, Austin, Texas-based South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival, followed in April by Robert DeNiro’s Manhattan-based Tribeca Film Festival — and this next month, the grand mama of them all, the prestigious and much-anticipated Cannes Film Festival, which has taken place on the leisurely French Riviera every year since 1946.

As we write above, VanRamblings loves independent — or, indie — film. But what is indie film? Hang on to your hat, because here we go …
Indie films are movies produced with a low budget, most often by small, boutique production companies, and produced for less than $20 million.
Originally, the defining quality of indie media (film, music, publishing, etc.) was that it was produced outside of the traditional systems of production. So in film, for example, movies produced without the support of the major Hollywood studios would be independent films, or “indies” for short.
After a few decades of independent media, however, aesthetic patterns and themes have emerged that make “indie” more of a style or genre label.
Confusing matters even more, in recent years the six major Hollywood studios — Fox, Paramount, Warner, Sony, Universal, and Disney — have brought indie films in-house, with Disney acquiring Miramax, Paramount (Vantage), Sony (Classics), Fox (Searchlight), Universal (Focus, Working Title), and Warner (New Line, Castle Rock), the major studios competing each year for prestigious Oscar attention with their much-ballyhooed “independent” art house releases, most of the films acquired by the studios but not financed by them, from many of the film festivals mentioned above.

With indie films, the director’s approach is paramount, these auteur films creative, artistic and personal in tone, with subject matter that reflects the lives of everyday people, or as is sometimes the case, the marginalized persons or communities within our cities, provinces or states; indie films also often take on forbidden subject matter considered to be taboo by conventional society. Indie films will more often than not use music sourced from bands or indie music groups or artists, rather than employ original orchestral scoring to aid in the telling of the film’s story.
At the most recent Oscars ceremony, as the latest clutch of arthouse films — including Darkest Hour, The Shape of Water, Call Me by Your Name and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri — were feted throughout the awards season, indie films grappled with Hollywood’s blockbuster addiction, and the new challenges presented by Netflix and Amazon.
While the big six Hollywood studios made 113 movies last year, taking in $11 billion in domestic box office and another $14 billion internationally, a record number of smaller-budget films were released from the beginning of January to the end of December 2017, most —&#32but not all — of the indie films released onto silver screens at a multiplex near you.
Why “not all”? Where did the “other” indie films secure release?

With 80 independent films currently set for production at Netflix, none of which will be given a theatrical release, in 2018 if you want to watch what might be a few of the most provocative films of the year, films made by some of the most prominent names in filmmaking, you’re going to have to stay home, or watch the latest Netflix “indie” on your smartphone or tablet.
Over the past couple of years, Netflix’s dominance of streaming platforms has proved game-changing for Hollywood, as they work to rewrite the film and TV universe to match its model. For anyone who cares about film and its future, that may be a scary thought, or sound potentially threatening.
But is it really?
Today, most studio greenlight conversations are at their most reductive: “Can we sell this in China?” By contrast, Netflix doesn’t care what “plays” in China, given its utter lack of presence in the country, and seeming lack of desire to gain a presence in the countries that comprise east Asia.
For now, the Netflix model injects a deep-pocketed force in the indie mix, their massive, near global reach casting a wide net, placing Netflix at the forefront of the wave of alternate narrative forms —&#32allowing producers to successfully argue for niche-audience titles that might struggle within the theatrical model —&#32while challenging the conventional distribution model.
As we write above, the early year annual Sundance, SXSW (South-by-Southwest), Tribeca and Cannes film festivals remain primary sources for the discovery of new directors and the first-rate indie films they take on the festival circuit, films that tend to garner critical and awards recognition at the end of each calendar year and, increasingly, films that are produced and screened only on Netflix. But not always. Cinema is not dead, yet.
Next month, VanRamblings will write about all the indie films that you can screen within a darkened, air-conditioned movie theatre, in this sure-to-be-sweltering upcoming summer season. In the meantime, look for …

Bisbee ’17. A Canadian première at next month’s 17th annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival, screening only once (so you’ll want to get your tickets now!), on Sunday, May 13th, 6pm at SFU Goldcorp Cinema, filmmaker and writer Robert Greene will be in attendance to present his latest film, and participate in a post-screening Q&A, responding to audience questions about a film that has variously been described as the “most talked-about documentary film of the year, an audacious, arresting dream-like mosaic”, Greene’s film focused on a traumatic 1917 immigrant deportation, when an Arizona sheriff —&#32backed by union-busting thugs hired by the mining companies —&#32rounded up striking workers, exiling them to the New Mexico desert … never to be heard from again. Greene’s film, while confronting an ugly truth, discovers a measure of healing and solidarity. See Bisbee ’17 next month at DOXA, or miss out on it forever.

C’mon back next Wednesday for more DOXA Documentary Film Festival coverage, which will fit nicely into our ongoing Vancouver Votes 2018 coverage. We’ll look forward to seeing you back here next Friday for feature coverage of DOXA 2018, and an interview with the tough, the brilliant, the wonderful, our friend, Selina Crammond, who this year succeeds the near irreplaceable Dorothy Woodend, as the festival’s new Programme Director.

Arts Friday | Lori McKenna | America’s Finest Roots Songwriter

November 24, 2017A & E, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, MusicRaymond Tomlin

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was head over heels in love with the music of Joni Mitchell — so much in love, in fact, that I turned around and married a woman (Cathy) who looked just like Joni Mitchell.

By the time the late 1970s rolled around, my woman singer-songwriter allegiance had switched definitively to Rickie Lee Jones — whose music became the soundtrack of my life through the late 1970s and 1980s, so much so, that Rickie Lee Jones also became the soundtrack of my children’s lives — that’d be Jude and Megan — as well. In the times to come, I will write about my love for Rickie Lee Jones, which has not abated to this day.
Being a callow fellow, as time rolled on my allegiance to a woman singer-songwriter of melancholy countenance switched to Iris DeMent in the early 1990s — for me, there is no better, more reflective and more melancholy album that has ever been recorded than Ms. DeMent’s 1993 release, My Life. Please find the entire album directly below. Have a listen …

As I say, though, I am a callow fellow, and by the late 1990s I had found a new love — a Boston-suburb-based housewife, mother to five children, wife of a Boston firefighter and, by far, the best roots songwriter this century. On another day, I’ll write about Lori McKenna at greater length. Today, you’ll find four of her songs at the top of the column — four of my favourite songs written by and sung by Lori McKenna … well worth a listen.
Recently, my friends and next door neighbours, Shirley Ross and Bill Tieleman celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary — I looked all over for Lori McKenna’s Stealing Kisses somewhere online, but until a couple of days ago, I couldn’t find it (and, truth to tell, I bet the video below won’t last long online — you’ll want to listen to Stealing Kisses while the opportunity is provided to you). Here is one of my favourite Lori McKenna songs.
Dedicated to Bill Tieleman and Shirley Ross, Happy 25th Anniversary …

Film Festival Season Arrives Much to the Delight of Cinephiles

September 4, 2015A & E, Cinema, VIFF 2015Raymond Tomlin

The most glorious time of year for cinéastes across the globe occurs in the month of September, as five prestigious film festivals programme films that in the months to come will take the world by storm, set the stage for Oscar season, and for true diehard festival attendees — in evanescent moments of cinematic splendour — allow the screening of hundreds of films spanning the globe in origin, to be seen only within the rarified humanist atmosphere of the film festival, thereafter to vanish forevermore. Sigh.
Only 48 short hours ago, the 72nd annual Venice Film Festival kicked off with the out of competition world première screening of Baltasar Kormakur’s emotionally riveting mountain climbing thriller, Everest, providing bursts of anxiety and cliff-hanging 3D drama in the star-studded Palazzo del Cinema on the Lido. Fortunate for Vancouver’s anticipatory hometown cinephile crowd, a goodly number of the lauded Biennale di Venezia films will find their way to our calming and beatific shores, as the always glorious and transformative 34th annual Vancouver International Film Festival sets about to screen many of the Venice Film Festival award-winners, our very own illustrious Festival-by-sea commencing at 10am, Thursday, Sept. 24th, completing its run late, late on Friday, October 9th.

Earlier this week, the fine folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival announced that their Opening Gala film will be the smash Sundance hit, Brooklyn. One of this autumn’s most anticipated film releases, and a certain Best Picture Oscar nominee, with Saorise Ronan a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nod, in his The Playlist review of Brooklyn, Rodrigo Perez wrote …

Home is where the heart is, and love, longing, and grieving for the departed fragments of our lives we can never return to are lovingly realized in John Crowley’s exquisitely crafted and beautiful Brooklyn. Based on the novel by Irish author Colm Tóibín, and delicately adapted by Nick Hornby, Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan), an Irish immigrant who travels to America in the early 1950s for a more prosperous life.

With empathetic specificity, Brooklyn nails the emotional complexity of homesickness beyond mere melancholic nostalgia. It’s a despair for the absence of friends, family, and comforting familiarities that define our lives, but as well a lovesick longing for a past that no longer exists; a tearful goodbye for a moment in time now awash in memory. With a beautiful tenderness that never rings false, Crowley’s graceful film fills in every emotional contour with warmth and sensitivity.

A heartbreaking and poignant story about choices, country, commitments, sacrifice, and love, Brooklyn is a superb, luminous, and bittersweet portrayal of who we are, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and the places we call home.

Brooklyn makes its Vancouver début at the Centre for the Performing Arts, at 7pm on Thursday, September 24th (the Festival has programmed two additional screenings of this must-see VIFF 2015 première).
Meanwhile, Curtis Woloschuk, Jack Vermee and the editorial members of VIFF’s publication team released this year’s glossy 108-page programming guide to the 2015 Festival, currently available at the Vancity Theatre, but soon to be available at libraries across Metro Vancouver, as well as bookstores, coffee shops, video stores and most any place that people gather. An impressive humanist document, The Complete Guide makes for a compelling read, as it sets about to provides a road map to the singularly most engaging arts event on the autumn calendar.

On Thursday, the Telluride Film Festival programming staff released the up until then secret list of future Oscar nominees set to screen in the southwestern mountainous climes of Miguel County, Colorado. The incomparable list of films that attendees will screen over the four-day Labour Day weekend, kicking off today, represent the very best in cinema that will be released in 2015 (note should be made that every Best Picture Oscar winner over the past 10 years made its début at Telluride).
Several of the films making their début at Telluride are also scheduled to screen at our very own VIFF, including certain Oscar contender, Son of Saul (which took Cannes by storm); Berlin Film Festival award-winner, 45 Years; Jafar Panahi’s Taxi; Lenny Abrahamson’s much-anticipated Room; and, Avishai Sivan’s shocking Festival winner, Tikkun, among many other prestigious award-winning international films of cinematic excellence.
Perhaps the most hotly anticipated film making it’s international début at Telluride is Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette, the film’s star — the luminous Carey Mulligan — a certain Best Actress Oscar contender. Suffragette arrives in Vancouver in late October.

Each year for the past 30 years and more, media from across the globe travel to the centre of the universe, as a calvacade of A-list Hollywood stars converge on Canada’s largest metropolitan centre for the Toronto Film Festival, where the movie industry is afforded the opportunity to present cinema’s (read: Hollywood’s) very best, where the prestige films on offer at TIFF will garner critical and, some months down the road, Oscar attention, where films reviewed in the hothouse atmosphere of Toronto to rapturous acclaim capture the public’s imagination (how could they not?), pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Hollywood’s already overladen coffers, gifting Hollywood’s woebegotten producers with the Oscar hardware that says, “You done good Hollywood. We forgive you for the plethora of cynical CGI-infected comic book movies. Thank you. You’ve done yourself proud.”

Last but certainly not least, there’s the heavily juried New York Film Festival, the 53rd version of which commences September 25th, the day after our very own festival by the sea, la-la-land’s always wonderful Vancouver International Film Festival, gets underway.
Can’t travel to New York for NYFF53? Not to worry. Although it drives VIFF print traffic mavens Kathy Evans and Selina Crammond absolutely bonkers, a goodly number of NYFF53’s finest also screen in Vancouver (Kathy and Selina on the phone with New York hourly to ensure the one and only “print” of the film makes it to Vancouver following the New York screening).
In 2015, New York and Vancouver share Miguel Gomes’s monumental yet light-footed magnum opus, Arabian Nights, Volumes 1, 2 & 3; Cannes Best Director winner Hou Hsiao-hsien’s, The Assassin; Brooklyn, Saoirse Ronan’s vibrantly alive emigré epic; Cemetery of Splendour, the wondrous new film by Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Experimenter, Michael Almreyda’s portrait of Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard), the social scientist whose 1961 “obedience study” reflected back on the Holocaust and anticipated Abu Ghraib.
The Forbidden Room, Guy Maddin’s insane and phantasmagorical magnum opus; In the Shadow of Women, the exquisite new film by the great Philippe Garrel, who takes a close look at infidelity, and the divergent ways in which it’s experienced and understood by men and women; The Lobster, absurdist Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ acclaimed Cannes Jury Prize winner; and The Measure of a Man, Stéphane Brizé’s powerful and troubling new film, which earned Vincent Lindon the Best Actor prize at Cannes.
Mountains May Depart, Jia Zhangke’s newest epic, spanning three decades in the lives of the film’s increasingly estranged characters, from the dawn of China’s capitalist explosion to the near future; My Golden Days, Arnaud Desplechin’s triptych exploration of first love; Right Now, Wrong Then, Hong Sangsoo’s wry comedy of manners, laced with heavy drinking & regret; and, The Treasure, Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s magical modern-day fable, which Variety called, “a deadpan gem.”
Count ’em. Fifteen of the New York Film Festival’s 30 heavily juried films will screen in Vancouver, virtually simultaneously with the Big Apple.

Film festivals offer a window on our world, and an intimate exploration of the lives of folks just like us, who reside in every far flung country across our globe. The Vancouver Film Festival: 16 days, 70 countries, 355 films.

Tickets (and passes) are on sale now for the 34th annual Vancouver International Film Festival at the Vancity Theatre, and soon at these listed locations. When I dropped by the Vancity on Thursday to pick up my hot-off-the-press copy of VIFF’s wonderfully gorgeous and expansive The Complete Guide (it’s free folks — pick up a copy, and schedule a dozen films, or three) ticket sales were brisk. A heartening sight to see, indeed.
Today’s Festival column constitutes the first of many such columns that will focus on the Vancouver International Film Festival. Commencing September 24th, VanRamblings will take a 17-day break from coverage of the federal election, VIFF winning out over Stephen Harper, Tom Mulcair and Justin Trudeau. Last year, VanRamblings covered Vancouver’s municipal election, and in consequence our usual VIFF coverage suffered — not this year!