Category Archives: Cinema

Arts Friday | Can Hollywood and Cineplexes Survive Coronavirus?

November 13, 2020Arts Friday, CinemaRaymond Tomlin

Movie theatres have endured world wars, depressions and recessions, and the advent of everything from television to streaming. But COVID-19 and the public health crisis it has generated this year around the globe represents an existential threat to the cinema business like no other.
The novel coronavirus pandemic is upending the movie business.
Once upon a time, a handful of big studios spent billions of dollars making movies, and marketing and distributing those movies to theatres across the globe. But over the past two decades, with a surge in content and streaming delivery services, the old way of doing things has been shifting.

Then, in early March of this year, COVID-19 started spreading across the globe in a big way. The first thing that happened was a bunch of blockbusters got moved: Black Widow Disney’s latest Marvel superhero adventure, was bumped from its May 1, 2020 release date to May 7 2021. That followed news Disney had delayed Mulan, originally slated for March 27, the film moved to Disney Plus — at $29 a pop for young families.

Ditto Warner Brothers’ Wonder Woman 1984, which was moved from this year to who knows when, and No Time to Die, the 25th 007 movie, about which there’s speculation that it, too, will soon become a VOD title.

Paramount’s A Quiet Place Part II (April 23 2021), and Universal’s F9, the latest in the Fast & Furious franchise were also moved (May 28, 2021).
Together, it was estimated that those movies would have brought in somewhere north of $1 billion at the box office in 2020.
“There’s never been a situation like this,” says IndieWire film critic, Eric Kohn. “Fear of the unknown is never a good thing. We’ll return to normalcy at some point, but as we ride this out, there’s going to be near-term pain.”
As Hollywood traverses uncharted territory, studio executives are pleading for patience. “We will get to the other side,” Jim Orr, president of domestic distribution for Universal Pictures, recently told respected industry trade publication Variety. “How long is all of this lasting? Nobody knows.”

Theatre owners believe that after two years of declining box office sales, business will return to normal, and they will see record high box office in 2021, as Hollywood releases a truckload of franchise sequels. The haul includes four films from the Marvel universe — Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (July 9, 2021); Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (tbd); Spider-Man 3 (tbd) and Thor: Love and Thunder (February 18, 2022) — as well as Jurassic World: Dominion (June 10, 2022)The Batman (March 4, 2022), Mission: Impossible 7 (tbd), Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (August 6, 2021) and Avatar 2 (December 16, 2021).
“When the 2021 box office eventually is reported, we believe it will be the pessimists and the naysayers who will turn out to have been wrong,” AMC chief Adam Aron told industry analysts in a zoom call earlier this month..
“This year’s box office is going to look like the biggest asterisk you’ve ever seen,” says Kohn. “You’ll never be able to compare 2020 to any other year and have it mean anything. It’s simply going to be a lost year.”

As Barry Hertz wrote in the Globe and Mail earlier this year, “All audiences can do now is hold out hope for a Hollywood ending.”

Arts Friday | The Impact of Cinema in Pre-Pandemic Times

October 23, 2020Arts Friday, Cinema, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

Nostalgia for a Time When Going to the Movies Was a Pleasure We All Enjoyed
Each and every one of us possess within us memories of our experiences visiting the cinema: as a child of attending at the movies with our parents; our first foreign or independent film with a group of friends; or simply visiting our local multiplex cinema to catch the latest superhero blockbuster, or making the pilgrimage to one local film festival or another.
Pre-pandemic, going to the movies was still a popular past-time, even in an age when media consumption and “film viewing” has radically changed (think of the Netflix revolution). In North America in 2019, there were 1.3 billion cinema admissions — a not-insignificant, nor surprising figure.

In 1930, more than 65% of the population went to the movies weekly. That means for every 5 people you knew, 3 of them went to the movies weekly.
Can you even imagine that?
Eighty-five years ago, cinema-going remained astoundingly popular across the continent, reaching a peak of 1.64 billion admissions in 1946 — even though the North American population was less than half of what it is today.
Why was cinema so popular in times past?
Some of the reasons are fairly straightforward: there was limited opportunity long ago for inexpensive recreational activities outside of the home, television had yet to assert its power, and film was an established medium which exposed millions to different worlds and alluring cultures (or, more often, to the vicissitudes of North American culture).
There was, however, a deeper and perhaps more fundamental reason for movie-going’s immense popularity in North America mid-20th century.
Recent research on movie-going habits in the twenty and 21st centuries has focused on the interplay between space and emotion, and how cinemas act as facilitators of emotional experiences in ambiguous spaces.
Over the years, movies have aided people in helping to reveal new insights into their lives, while allowing a better understanding of the lived experiences of people across the globe, and in their own neighbourhood. Cinema has not only traced our conception of life, but has also served to affect our outlook on life and the lives of others.
Watching a film in the presence of others is different from watching a film alone, or with our family: the collective constellation affects the way viewers experience a film, made all the more obvious once strong emotions and affective expressions come into play: laughter, sadness, shame, anger, screaming, and more often than not (if we’re lucky) being moved to tears.
Different times in history — and different spaces — have served to create new affective landscapes and altered existing ones, making cinema a useful category for historians to study changes in society and culture over time.
The history of cinema has been integrated alongside other sociological methodologies to help form a more refined and complex picture of the past, and in consequence has offered a valuable way of introducing new insights into the establishment of popular culture, and societal development.
The darkness of the cinema environment presents the opportunity to experience a strong shared emotional experience in a public setting, in the anonymous environment of the auditorium. No other public space has facilitated this to such a degree, and this uniqueness reveals how the life of our society developed in specific contexts and in precise locations.
The enclosed and defined space of the cinema auditorium, containing a distinct group in the form of an audience, is an obvious example of community. Patrons in the cinema are aware of both their own emotional response to what they are viewing onscreen, and the feelings of those around them, providing reassurance that our emotional responses to a film are being mirrored by our fellow patrons.
Respected film critic Leslie Halliwell recalled in his memoir on cinema-going that film took “people furthest out of themselves, into a wondrous and beautiful world which became their Shangri-La”.

This utopia was reflected in the very names of cinemas — the Orion, the Rialto, the Plaza, the Regal — and in the architecture of the buildings which encompassed a range of styles including the clean lines of Art Deco and the high theatrics and excess of the “atmospherics”.

The Grandview Theatre, Commercial Drive at East 1st Avenue in Vancouver, in the 1950s

Evidence suggests that many people viewed their local movie-house, whether a stand-alone, second-run neighbourhood movie house or a first-run super-cinema, as a reassuring and familiar space characterized by a hazy emotionality fluctuating between the individual and the group, in the process offering a sense of connection with those who surrounded us.
This ambiguity — the individual vs the collective experience — lies at the heart of what attending at the cinema signifies to people. In few other areas of life are the landscapes of our lives softened to such a degree, in turn making attendance at the cinema a welcoming experience.

Cinemas have long occupied a position on the boundary between the domestic and the public, allowing our emotional experience of a movie concurrently as both communal and private, the evolving emotional landscapes which were crafted by cinema patrons in the mid-20th-century serving to break down anomie while creating a sense of connection.
The fundamentals of our affective experience at the movies has changed little over the past 100 years.
The price of popcorn, however, most definitely has.

Arts Friday | Netflix Takes Over the Oscars in 2021

October 16, 2020A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Media, Netflix, Television, Video & DVD, Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

In 2019, Netflix landed its first Oscar nomination for Best Picture with the release of Alfonso Cuarón’s critically acclaimed Roma. A year later, the streaming service was leading the field with 24 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture nods for both The Irishman and Marriage Story.
As Netflix’s impact on the world of cinema became increasingly undeniable, the younger and more diverse film academy was no longer prepared to shun the streaming service as the old Hollywood guard tried to do. Earlier this year, on April 28th, responding to the changes that COVID-19 had wrought, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences removed the stipulation that a movie must be shown in a theatre before it could become eligible for the coveted Best Picture Oscar nomination.
And thus the stage was set for an Oscar ceremony in 2021 the likes of which no one will have ever seen before, with at least seven Netflix releases eligible for a Best Picture nomination, with each of those films set for Oscar nominations, ranging from Best Actor and Actress, Supporting Actress and Actor, to Best Director, Music, Sound and technical awards.
Today on VanRamblings, the Netflix features set to dominate Oscars 2021.

For the upcoming Academy Awards — delayed due to the pandemic until Sunday, April 25th — Netflix has pulled out all the stops. Already streaming, there’s Spike Lee’s Best Picture contender Da 5 Bloods, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s well-mounted action thriller The Old Guard, and Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay contender, I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
And, available today on Netflix, there’s writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 which is, as Variety lead critic Owen Gleiberman writes, “a knockout, and the rare drama about the 1960s that’s powerful, authentic and moving enough to feel as if it were taking place today, a briskly paced and immersive film bristling with Sorkin’s distinctive verbal fusillades, a cinematic powder keg of film with a serious message that seamlessly blends a conventional yet compelling courtroom procedural with protest reenactments and documentary footage, the film offering an absorbing primer of a ruefully meaningful period in American history.”

Due to arrive on Netflix on Tuesday, November 24th — on the eve of American Thanksgiving — director Ron Howard’s big budget film adaptation of J.D. Vance’s autobiographical best-seller, Hillbilly Elegy offers a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town, that also provides broader, probing insight into the struggles of America’s white working class.
A passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis, Glenn Close and Amy Adams are at the centre of Howard’s film, and solid prospects for Best Actress and Best Supporting Oscar nods. Howard will be in the mix, as well.

Netflix will release David Fincher’s Mank in select theatres in November before the black-and-white film begins streaming on December 4th.
The Hollywood-centric period piece follows alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (certain Best Actor nominee Gary Oldman) as he races to finish the screenplay for Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. That classic picture was fraught with behind the scenes drama, as Mankiewicz and Welles argued over credit and who wrote what, which became even more important once the film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
The original script for Mank was written by Fincher’s father, Jack Fincher, so this project certainly means a lot to the filmmaker. Mank boasts a running time of 2 hours and 11 minutes, so it won’t be quite as long as Zodiac or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not that Fincher ever wastes a single frame. The film is expected to be a major awards contender for Netflix.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. George C. Wolfe directs, Denzel Washington produces, and Oscar-winner Viola Davis (Fences) stars as Ma Rainey in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s adaptation of the hit August Wilson Broadway play. The late Chadwick Boseman and If Beale Street Could Talk star Colman Domingo play members of Rainey’s ’20s jazz band.
Awards prospects: Ambitious trumpeter Levee was 43-year-old Boseman’s final role before succumbing to his private battle with colon cancer in August; he looks rail thin in film stills. Posthumous Oscars went to Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) and Peter Finch (Network) among others. In this case, with the beloved Black Panther star also in the running for his supporting role as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam in the Spike Lee joint, Da 5 Bloods, many believe that it’s likely Boseman will wind up in the Best Actor category for Ma Rainey, with Davis as Best Actress. Like Mank, the elaborate period setting should be attractive to Academy craft branches.
Release date: In theatres early December, streams on Netflix December 18.

Oscar-winner and Hollywood icon George Clooney directs The Midnight Sky, a sci-fi thriller with a script by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) based on the Lily Brooks-Dalton novel about an Arctic scientist (Clooney) attempting to warn a NASA spaceship astronaut (Felicity Jones) not to return to doomed planet Earth. Awards prospects: Netflix took advantage of the London Film Festival this month (October 2 – 18) with a tribute to Clooney, complete with clips. Critical reaction will determine whether The Midnight Sky will figure in the Oscar sweepstakes, but Clooney (Syriana) has delivered in the past, as has Oscar-nominated Jones (Theory of Everything).
Release date: In theatres early December, Netflix début to be announced.

VIFF 2020 | Vancouver International Film Festival Draws to a Close

October 7, 2020Cinema, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

The pandemic, virtual 39th edition of our city’s — and this year, province-wide — annual Vancouver International Film Festival ends tonight, just before the stroke of midnight, at precisely 11:59pm. Fourteen days, 100+ films from across the globe, available for you to stream at home through the VIFF Connect app, or service, has allowed you to stream the world’s most acclaimed films. As always, VIFF 2020 was a celebration of the best in world cinema. A hearty thank you is due to #VIFF programmers and staff.
Just a few hours left to stream Thomas Vinterberg’s furious and sad, utterly humane and insightful drama, Another Round, a VIFF 2020 standout, and must-see. If you’ve not already screened Another Round, we’re here to tell you that it would be the perfect film to end the bacchanalia of cinema that has visited our shores and invaded your home these past fourteen days.

So what now, you ask? As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic gains force, fully prepared to keep all of us in its grip through the end of 2021 — and as we continue our regimen of remaining at home to keep ourselves safe — where are we going to turn to envelop ourselves in our crying need for humane cinema? VanRamblings has heartening news.

Last evening, year-round VIFF programmer Tom Charity wrote this to us:

“Our hope at VIFF is to offer as many films as possible, simultaneously at the Vancity Theatre, and available to stream through VIFF Connect, an extension of what VIFF has achieved over the past 14 days. In some cases, that won’t be possible, as with Aaron Sorkin’s future Best Picture Oscar nominee, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, which will open tomorrow (October 8th) at the Vancity Theatre before making its début on Netflix, on October 16th. All of the other films programmed into the Vancity Theatre will be available both as an In-Cinema, and a VIFF Connect home theatre experience. For the foreseeable future, we at VIFF believe this circumstance will be the “new normal”, throughout our COVID times.”

A full list of upcoming Vancity Theatre screenings is available here. Patrons should familiarize themselves with the VIFF Centre Health and Safety Protocols before booking, and attending a Vancity Theatre screening.

Well, that’s it folks. Only hours to go before VIFF 2020 draws to a close. You know what to do. Close the blinds, pull the curtains, and join with thousands of other British Columbians who will tonight let the light of international cinema shine bright for one last, glorious evening of cinema.
Thank you VIFF for once again opening a window on this world of ours.