Some years ago, as I have written previously, my friend J.B. Shayne was in my home, and scanning my vast CD collection (we’re talking the early ’90s here), he commented, “Do you realize that 80% of your record collection features female vocalists?” In fact, the percentage of female singer-songwriters in my music collection is probably closer to ninety per cent.
Today, I present a couple of songs from my iTunes / Spotify music collection by artist Regina Spektor, who although she hasn’t achieved the mainstream success of a Fiona Apple or a Tori Amos, nonetheless deserves much more recognition for her weighty, low key 19-year career than it’s earned to date.
Whimsical, with great melodies and brilliant songcraft, Regina Spektor’s music is simply beautiful, both lyrically and musically, with an almost angelic quality to them, showcasing always her distinctive vocals and winsome piano talents, a storyteller of the first order, a singer-songwriter brimming with personality, and more than capable of conjuring up moments of wisdom, maturity and magic, in a career deserving of celebration and recognition, that is uniquely — and unmistakably — hers and hers alone.
Samson was initially recorded as the first track for Regina Spektor’s second album, Songs, which she recorded in one take on Christmas Day 2001. In 2006, Ms. Spektor re-recorded the song for her album Begin to Hope, which, unlike Songs, had a major label backing. And, the rest is history.
Regina Spektor’s best songs tweak inviting melodies with bits of eccentricity in rhythm and vocal cadence, resulting in music that skilfully hits emotional buttons without coming across as formulaic. Laughing With, which was the first single released from her fifth album, Far, doesn’t quite play to those strengths, but instead opts for a modern balladry that is, as you will hear, ideally suited to our trying and most difficult pandemic times.
For about a decade or so now, in addition to his responsibilities choosing and booking heart-filled, audience-pleasing films into VIFF’s gorgeously well-wrought Vancity Theatre (about which we’ll have more to say, another day), VIFF programmer Tom Charity has played a critical role in curating the film selections which make their way into the final array of international cinema that inspires and delights audiences who love our awe-inspiring Vancouver International Film Festival, now unspooling as VIFF’s glorious and transforming 39th annual — this year virtual — window on our world.
Yesterday, the affable Tom Charity began his own festival — which is to say, watching films in his modest home theatre setting, as he and his lovely bride (and family) commenced the process of “screening” VIFF films he’d not seen, but had read and heard great things about — joining with myriad VIFF aficionados, equally ready to immerse themselves deep within the gift that is our illustrious and much cherished local international film festival.
At the outset of Tom’s Facebook post, he writes about Summer of 85, Another Round, Undine and Falling, VIFF films VanRamblings had recently previewed for our readers earlier in the month, those previews (replete with trailers for the films) are available to you here and here.
Click on any of links below to be taken to the VIFF web page for that film.
My Donkey, My Lover & I (France). As the VIFF guide says, “An official selection for Cannes 2020, Caroline Vignal’s delightful movie is a breath of fresh air, blending life lessons, romance, insight and scenery.”
Plus the four Indigenous films Tom writes about on Facebook … Inconvenient Indian
VanRamblings absolutely loves lists. As the year nears its end, we are in list heaven — best albums, best books, best tech and, most important of all and much to our delight, best films, for which lists galore may be found.
Just this week, the National Board of Review critics association released their list of the best films of 2019, awarding several films of distinction in the process. The very next day, the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle — comprised of most of the continent’s finest film critics — released their list of 2019’s best films, conferring awards on actors, directors and films. In both instances, Martin Scorsese’s epic film The Irishman won Best Picture.
With the above in mind, Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tom Charity put his list of the year’s best together — and, fortunate for us, all of those films will get a screening at the comfiest, most welcoming cinema venue in town, VIFF’s year ’round home, the cozy Vancity Theatre.
VIFF’s Best of 2019 gets underway on Friday, December 20th with …
Jordan Peele’s Us, starring NYFCC Best Actress winner, Lupita Nyong’o. Screens only once, on Saturday night, December 21st, 7:45pm, at the Vancity Theatre, on Seymour Street.
Clicking on any of the title links above and below, will take you to the film title’s VIFF page, where you will see a full description of the film, and where you may purchase tickets for the screening. Individual tickets, $11 (VIFF membership required). A discount three-ticket pack is available for $30.
Multiple award winner Monos will screen Monday, Dec. 23rd, 7:45pm, Vancity Theatre.
Next up, VanRamblings’ nominee as the best film of 2019, urgent, intimate, subtle, moving, the only truly wrenching, punch in the gut film of the year we’ve seen, an absolute must-see, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn’s tour-de-force The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open — set in and around Stamps Place (once called the Raymur Housing Project), on Vancouver’s eastside. As Sarah-Tai Black writes in the Globe and Mail, The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is “transforming, striking, gentle, impactful, world-affirming, utterly remarkable, essential, heartrending, tender … and wholly authentic.”
The Body Remembers. Boxing Day, Thursday, December 26th, 7:45pm, Vancity Theatre.
The Farewell will screen on Friday, December 27th, 7:20pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
Honeyland will screen on Saturday, December 28th, 7:20pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
And screening immediately following the luminous & utterly unforgettable, award-winning documentary Honeyland, Australian director Jennifer Kent’s controversial follow-up to The Babadook, the unrelenting horror pic …
The Nightingale screens on Saturday, December 28th, 9pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
And on Sunday, December 29th, 7pm at the Vancity Theatre an international film feature double bill that will knock your socks off: Spain’s auteur filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s best film in years, with a Cannes Best Actor award-winning performance by Antonio Banderas at its centre, Pain and Glory — which will screen at the Vancity Theatre on Sunday, December 29th at 7pm — offers mature, understated and evocative filmmaking of the first order, combining a deep sense of humanity with a touch of erotic beauty, an emotional rendering of a person that is at once gentle and naked, hushed, agonizing and dazzling, full of life, electric, heart-wrenching and as piercing and deeply intimate a reflection on what it means to grow old as you’ll ever see on film, Pain and Glory is the filmmaker’s best and most personal movie in years, a cinematic momento full of indelible moments, redolent with a meditative force that will knock you sideways, a tragicomic swirl of heartbreak and joy, and an utter triumph. A must-see.
And at 9pm, following the screening of Pain and Glory, Mati Diop’s stunner Atlantics, about which at one time lead Globe and Mail film critic Liam Lacey wrote, “A magic realist fantasy, a ghost story, a love story and political allegory, a film of tactile intimacy and teeming energy, about women’s autonomy, migration and corruption, vital and realist, a world-shattering film about unspeakable tragedy, Atlantics packs a deceptive amount of complexity into its 104 minute running time, offering a narrative perspective about class and post-imperialism that is touching, romantic, impressively nuanced and an expertly rendered tour-de-force.”
A World Cinema Dramatic prize winner at Sundance earlier this year, director Joanna Hogg’s best film yet, The Souvenir, is an instant British classic. The New York Times’ A. O. Scott writes, “The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours,” while Guy Lodge writes in Variety, “Achingly well-observed in its study of a young artist inspired, derailed and finally strengthened by a toxic relationship, it is at once the coming-of-age story of many women and a specific creative manifesto for one of modern British cinema’s most singular writer-directors.”
The Souvenir screens on Monday, December 30th, 7:45pm, at the Vancity Theatre.
There are four more films that are screening as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Best of 2019 film series — at least two of which will vye for a Best Picture win at the Oscars on February 9th, but you’ll just have to click here for the titles of those films, and the date and time that each will screen at the Vancity Theatre. Enjoy your film-going holidays.
Best of 2019 | Video created by Cindy Shi for the Vancouver International Film Festival.
In the coming weeks, VanRamblings will publish a list of our top 20 films of 2019, from Teen Spirit (now available on Amazon Prime) back in February through all the films yet to screen in Vancouver — from Clint Eastwood’s new film, Richard Jewell (December 13) to director Jay Roach’s story of the takedown of Fox News’ Roger Ailes, Bombshell (December 20), plus Greta Gerwig’s all-star cast adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Sam Mendes’ epic WW1 blockbuster, 1917, both set to open Christmas Day.
Now, two of VanRamblings’ top 20 films of 2019 that demand to be seen … Best Propulsive Good Time Hollywood Popcorn Flick of 2019
The first Hollywood film of 2019 that offers movie patrons a guaranteed good time inside a darkened movie theatre, a film for the whole family, the last film made by 20th Century Fox before they sold the company to Disney, a glorious barn burner of a film redolent with heart-in-mouth and tug-at-the-heart emotion, not only one of the greatest racing movies ever made, but an infectious, engrossing true life drama that features some of the finest onscreen performances of the year, Matt Damon as you’ve never seen him before and Christian Bale sympathetic and at top of form, with a supporting cast who will pull you into this audience-pleasing story like mad.
In other words, a must-see film at the multiplex. And it opens today! Ford v Ferrari is expected to win the weekend box office handily with as much as $31 million at 3,528 venues across the continent (and, likely, another $20+ million in foreign markets over the first weekend, with China and the rest of Asia set to screen Ford v Ferrari in the weeks to come — all of which oughta make the film a solid 2019 Oscar contender). The Disney-Fox film follows an eccentric team of American engineers and designers, led by automotive visionary Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and his British driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who are dispatched by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) to build a new vehicle to defeat the dominant Ferrari at the 1966 Le Mans world championship in France.
Click on the graphic above to access reviews for Ford v Ferrari on Rotten Tomatoes
The Probable Best Picture Academy Award Winner for 2019
Opening today for two weeks only in exclusive engagement at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre on Seymour Street — where advance tickets for the three screenings each day this weekend are already sold old — Martin Scorsese’s gangster opus, the capper of a directorial career that spans fifty years, the film that opened the New York Film Festival to rave reviews, a film that clocks in at 209 minutes that will seem like half that time the film is so enthralling, one of the five films that will garner the most Oscar nominations — a probable Best Picture Academy Award winner come Sunday evening, February 9th — The Irishman is, as Boston Globe critic Ty Burr enthuses, “a masterpiece”, a film Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times says is “the best film of the year and one of the best films of the decade,” and as other critics have written …
… a genuinely new, deeply satisfying, serenely confident film presented with subtlety, wit and resonance, a sumptuous film that tells an epic, extraordinary tale of organized crime’s grip on American life as seen through the eyes of one outwardly ordinary man, a film that is a revelation throughout, intoxicating, history-making cinema, a melancholy eulogy for growing old and losing your humanity, a film to be savoured in every one of its 209 minutes, a knockout story that is surprisingly, surpassingly delicate, told by a master filmmaker with heart and sombre introspection, a film that takes a deep dive into the darkest of souls but manages to remain engaging, lively, funny, full of grace, tender, reflective, mournful, a film of grandeur and bloody memories, a heartbreaking film that presents Joe Pesci as you’ve never seen him before, with superb performances from Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — together for the first time in a Scorsese film — and an absolute must-see at the cinema.”
So, that’s it: two of the best films of 2019, both deserving of your time and scarce dollars, both films (in their own way) epic and unforgettable cinema.
