Category Archives: Cinema

Holiday Season | VanRamblings Will Reduce Posting This Month

December 1, 2018#VanPoli Civic Politics, Cinema, Music, Park Board, Politics, Stories of a Life, VanRamblings, Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

The 2018 holiday season, and VanRamblings reduces our incidence of posting

The holiday season is upon us. For VanRamblings that means spending time with friends and family (as I suspect is the case with most of us), and a level of busyness that is unusual for us — given that much of our life is given over to the creative endeavour of writing on VanRamblings, which entails a dozen hours or more each day sitting in front of our computer composing the posts that you read from time to time, on this blog of ours.
From April 20th on of this year — six months out from the 2018 Vancouver municipal election —&#32there was a raison d’être for VanRamblings: to introduce you to the candidates we felt were worthy and deserving of your vote. To that end, we wrote as many as 2500 words each day about the 2018 Vancouver municipal election, the issues we felt were important for candidates to address, and who we felt best were most capable of creating the city we need, a fairer and more just city for all.
While it remains our intention to continue our coverage of Vancouver City Council, School Board and Park Board, we are not quite so obsessed with civic governance and all that occurs each day with the process of decision-making that will lead to creating a city for all of us. In Vancouver, we’ve elected our Mayor, Kennedy Stewart, and a pretty darn fine group of City Councillors, School Board trustees and Park Board Commissioners — we’re prepared to let them get on with the job sans the obsessive coverage that has come to define VanRamblings these past almost eight months.

Damara, our new 3-year-old kitty, soon to be our companion as we write each day.

Here’s our plan for VanRamblings, then, going forward, which, of course, is subject to change — we’re planning on writing about politics once or twice a week this month. We have a column on Janet Fraser, Chairperson of the Vancouver School Board, that we’re intending to write, with likely publication this upcoming week (for the record, we consider Dr. Fraser to be a transformative political figure, and believe we should all be grateful for the gift of her presence on Vancouver’s political scene). We’ve also got a column on Vancouver International Film Festival programmer Tom Charity’s Best of 2018, which it is our current intention to publish next Friday.
In fact, VanRamblings will publish a great many columns on film this month — because we love film, considering it to be the art of our age, and during the April through October period we forfeited our love of film in favour of covering the election — where the majority of candidates we endorsed were elected to office, as well as a few we failed to endorse, but should have.
As far as is possible, in addition to our once or twice a week political coverage, we’ll keep up our Arts Friday coverage — which will be given over to film for the foreseeable future, but within which we plan to expand our coverage into other facets of Vancouver’s arts scene. We’ll continue our Stories of a Life feature — no such posting this week, or last, but next week we promise — and our Music Sunday feature, which tomorrow oughta emerge as a sort of Story of a Life when, and if, it actually comes to fruition. Tuesdays and Thursdays may be fallow days, or given over to tech coverage — we have a column for Apple iPhone SE, 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7, 7 Plus, 8, 8 Plus, and X users we’ll publish this upcoming Tuesday.
In the new year, VanRamblings will finally write about our cancer journey — which “story” will begin 10 months prior to our official cancer diagnosis. We’ll introduce you to those who made a difference in our life, and who are — we believe — the reason we are here today, enabling you to read those words on the screen in front of you (there’ll be a great many political folks who will find their way into our reporting out, as our “life savers”).
Thank you for hanging in with us.
Going forward, it is our intention to remain relentlessly positive about pretty much darn near everyone and everything, while focusing on change for the better, and a better life for everyone in all aspects of our lives.

Arts Friday | 2018 | Cinema | A Year To Be Thankful for

November 23, 2018A & E, Cinema, Netflix, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

As the cinematic year draws to a close, today on VanRamblings — given that it’s American Thanksgiving — we take a fond look back at 2018 and some of the movie-related innovations we have to be thankful for this year.

As we’ve written previously, 2018 marked the year of the return of the romantic comedy — not at the cinema, but on Netflix, where mid-budget smash hits like To All the Boys I’ve Loved and The Kissing Booth, both mid-budget teen romantic comedies, gained massive followings on social media, while re-establishing the rom-com as a genre that should not be underestimated. Good on Netflix for reviving this near forgotten genre.

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 and Independent Spirit Award nominee — including Best Actor, Supporting Actress, Director and Feature — and a must-see film streaming on demand.
Netflix Starts to Prioritize Theatrical Releases

For the longest time, Netflix refused to screen their films in theatres, which last year hurt the chances of Dee Rees’ Mudbound winning any Academy Awards, despite its four Oscar nominations.
In 2018, after allowing certain films exclusive theatrical engagements — including the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs a week before it hit its platform, and in 42 select theatres across North America, Alfonso Cuarón’s almost certain Best Picture Academy Award winner Roma, which will screen exclusively in Vancouver at the Vancity Theatre, December 14th through the end of December — while Netflix is still the disrupter it’s always been, 2018 is the year they thankfully realized theatres still matter.
The Most Exciting Foreign-Language Academy Award Race in Years

Whether it be Poland’s Cold War, Mexico’s Roma, South Korea’s Burning, Israel’s The Cakemaker, Denmark’s The Guilty, Colombia’s Birds of Passage, Belgium’s Girl, Hungary’s Sunset, Japan’s Shoplifters, Sweden’s Border, or Lebanon’s Capernaum, there is an embarrassment of riches of foreign language films vying for an Academy Award this year. Lucky us.

Arts Friday | Oscar Contenders Already Playing in Theatres

November 16, 2018A & E, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

It’s that most wonderful time of the year: the season when blockbuster holiday movies and Oscar contenders collide.
Do you like to take yourself too seriously and lecture people on the pitfalls of British period pieces? No worries: VanRamblings has your back.
No matter what you’re looking for, November probably has it in store for you. Today on VanRamblings, the best movies — Oscar contenders, and just plain, flat out good fun inside a darkened movie theatre, plus a probable Best Picture Oscar winner opening next month that is a must-see — but mostly, films currently playing at your local multiplex (and at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre) that you should keep an eye out for during the early part of the 2018 holiday season.
Holiday Movies & Oscar Contenders Currently Playing in Vancouver

A Star is Born
Whaddya mean you haven’t seen Bradley Cooper’s smashing directorial début? This multiple Oscar contender, since it’s October 5th opening weekend, has (as of Wednesday) already grossed a record $330,259,035 on a puny $36 million production budget. You don’t care about that stuff? Fine. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t see the single most entertaining film on offer this holiday season, worth every penny you’ll pay at the box office.

Transit. Opens today. Vancity Theatre.
Christian Petzold’s masterful new film, Transit, opens today at the Vancity Theatre for a limited, seven screening run. A refugee portrait that lands at a place of piercing emotional acuity, Petzold’s adaptation of Anna Seghers’ 1942 novel takes a brazen, bounding risk right off the bat by stripping its story — about a German concentration camp survivor seeking passage to North America in Nazi-occupied France — of any external period trappings, relocating it to a kind of liminal, sunburned present day. As Variety critic Guy Lodge writes, “there’s a method to the madness of Petzold’s modern-dress Holocaust drama: Transit invites viewers to trace their own speculative connections between Seghers’ narrative and the contemporary rise in neo-Nazism and anti-refugee sentiment, all while its principal story remains achingly moving.” Startling and gut-wrenching. Recommended.

Say it with me, “Melissa McCarthy. Best Actress Oscar winner.” I knew you could. Currently screening exclusively at Vancouver’s Fifth Avenue Cinema.

77,000 women and men are currently being held in conversion therapy across North America. Arising from a motion moved by retired Vancouver City Councillor Tim Stevenson, gay conversion therapy is now banned in the city of Vancouver. Boy Erased oughta provide some insight into why that is.

The most compelling reason to see A Private War is Rosamund Pike’s stunning, sure-to-be Oscar nominated performance as Marie Colvin, the American war correspondent who died in a bombardment while covering the Syrian government’s 2012 siege of Homs. Absorbing & transformative.

Academy Award winner Damien Chazelle’s First Man has emerged as the most compelling, Oscar contending movie of the holiday season, a film that demands to be seen, a lock Best Supporting Actress contender in Claire Foy, with a raft of other Oscar nominations sure to follow. A must-see film.

Widows. Opens today. Cineplex International Village + more.
Tour-de-force filmmaking from Academy Award-winning director Steve McQueen & the breakout surprise of the holiday season that has catapulted Viola Davis into the Best Actress Oscar race, Widows is gracefully written, soulful, smart and darkly exhilarating, weaving statements on race, gender, crime and grief into a tick-tock heist plot, a sinewy treat of a film that seamlessly intertwines close-up character studies & big picture politics into a mournful, brilliantly tense and strikingly relevant entertainment that will have you gripping your seat throughout its taut 140-minute running time.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Golden Lion winner (that’s Best Film to the uninitiated) at this year’s Venice Film Festival will win the Best Picture Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24th, 2019. You read it here first.
And we don’t mean Best Foreign Language Film — we mean, the Academy Award for Best Picture. Period. Funded by Netflix, and due to début on the streaming service in mid-December, Roma demands to be seen on the big screen. But where? Yep, Vancity Theatre programmer Tom Charity has managed to secure the exclusive rights to screen Alfonso Cuarón’s new film next month, as the film is meant to be seen: in a darkened theatre, in comfy seats, in the respectful, hushed confines of the Vancity Theatre.
From Friday, December 14th at 3pm (when I’ll see the film), through Thursday, December 20th at 8:20pm, this year’s certain Best Picture Academy Award winner will screen an unprecedented three times a day (except for Sunday, December 16th, when Roma will screen only twice).
Update: Due to demand, more screenings of Roma have been added, daily through December 31st (not Christmas Day). See Roma as you are able.
Think of it as a very special post-Chanukah / early Christmas present from the good and fine and tremendous folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and the esteemed and erudite (and cinema-loving) Tom Charity — the best darned gift any cinema lover could wish for this holiday season.
Click here to book your screening of Cuarón’s Golden Lion winner, and treat yourself to great cinema. You’ll be mighty glad you did — we promise.

Arts Friday | Burning & Madeline’s Madeline | Vancity Theatre

November 9, 2018A & E, Cinema, Diversions, Pop Culture, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

The 37th annual Vancouver International Film Festival — home to all that is good, great and life-changing in independent film, and award-winning film from countries spanning the globe — wrapped one month ago.
For many, the Festival closing for another year is cause for despair, for where else other than VIFF will lovers of film discover authentic cinema?
As we have written many times previously on VanRamblings, Tom Charity is the year-round programmer of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre, on Seymour just north of Davie & across the street from the expansive, much-cherished community amenity, Emery Barnes Park.
Eleven months of the year, the good and great Mr. Charity programmes the very best in independent and world cinema, home to transcendently lovely films of import, award winning cinema that finds a home in the gorgeous, comfy and intimate 175-seat Vancity Theatre. For our new Mayor and ten new Vancouver City Councillors, the Vancity is not only our — which is to say, the citizens’ — cinema, it is your cinema. Why, your cinema?
The home of the Vancouver International Film Festival, and the creation of the Vancity Theatre, occurred consequent to a demand by the city of Vancouver with the developer of the overshadowing Brava condominium complex that a constituent element of the Brava development, as the developers’ community amenity contribution, would be the realization of a year-round home for VIFF, and the creation of a city and a neighbourhood state-of-the-art cinema, which came to be known as the Vancity Theatre.
As our new City Council’s point person on the arts, and as a member of our community who fought hard for the preservation of the east side’s Rio Theatre, Councillor Michael Wiebe — who, on occasion, we have seen in the audience of the Vancity, as we have seen other of our newly-electeds, as well as recent and past members of Council — should, from time to time, remember that the Vancity Theatre is their home, as it is home for so many of us who look to VIFF for cinematic insight into the human condition — and you know what, the Vancity Theatre always, always comes through.
As is the case today, with two outstanding films that have captured the interest of cinéastes everywhere, and this year have taken the globe, and film festivals across the globe, by storm as ineffable, astonishing and triumphantly inventive cinema of the first order, compelling, extraordinary and intoxicating cinema magic that demands your attention & attendance.

Madeline’s Madeline, Vancity Theatre, 1181 Seymour Street. Now playing.
Friday, November 9th, at 6pm
Saturday, November 10th 2018, at 5pm
Sunday, November 11th, at 8pm
Wednesday, November 14th, at 4pm
Thursday, November 15th, at 1pm
Written and directed by Josephine Decker and starring remarkable newcomer Helena Howard, Madeline’s Madeline is a stunner, a hit at Sundance earlier this year, cinema considered by many critics to be one of the best films of the year. Described by IndieWire’s David Ehrlich as …

“… an ecstatically disorienting experience that defines its terms right from the start and then obliterates any trace of traditional film language, achieving a cinematic aphasia that allows Decker to redraw the boundaries between the stories we tell and the people we tell them about, Madeline’s Madeline emerges as one of the boldest and most invigorating American films of the 21st century, a dazzling hall of mirrors, a mesmerizing and unshakeable cinematic experience that demands your attention.”

Madeline’s Madeline opens at 6pm tonight at the Vancity Theatre.

Burning. Opens tonight at 7:50pm, at the Vancity Theatre, on Seymour.
Saturday, November 10th, 2pm
Saturday, November 10th, 6:50pm
Sunday, November 11th, at 5:10pm
Wednesday, November 14th, at 1pm
Thursday, November 15th, at 3pm
Friday, November 16th, at 8:30pm

Lee Chang-dong’s masterful thriller and Cannes FIPRESCI Prize winner, Burning is South Korea’s 2018 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar entry, and a film sure to end up on a raft of critical top-10 lists, cinema that shudders with ravenous desire, a meticulous and mysterious slow-burning thriller that transforms into a masterful look at jealousy, class, and revenge that, despite its 148 minutes, quickens its pace as it moves along, all the while torching genre clichés, Burning emerging as a subtle, teasing mystery that develops into a full-blown thriller, and cinema that leaves a lasting, scorching blister that purifies the soul. Clearly, then, a must-see film.