Category Archives: Cinema

Arts Friday | DOXA 2019 | Selina Crammond Celebration Day

May 3, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, CinemaRaymond Tomlin

On VanRamblings yesterday, we wrote about Selina Crammond, all around good person, community activist, person of principle, and someone who keeps VanRamblings on the straight and narrow (as must appear obvious to anyone, VanRamblings needs all the help we can get — particularly when it comes from persons of conscience like Selina).

In addition to Selina Crammond’s community activism and commitment to change for the better, her ace drumming in the feminist four-piece moody-pop buddy-rock band supergroup Supermoon (see the video above), growing up in the chilly, rural climes of The Pas (630 km northwest of Winnipeg, and considered to be the Gateway to the North), Selina’s sterling work over the years with the good folks at the Vancouver International Film Festival, her longtime membership in Vancouver’s progressive, working class, roots-based political party, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, and by very dint of her presence in our lives just generally bringing a sense of joy, optimism and activism into people’s lives, the aforementioned 34-year-old Selina Crammond is also the Director of Programming (this is her second year in that capacity, although she’d worked with Dorothy Woodend and the fine staff and volunteers at DOXA, for years and years and years) with Vancouver’s prestigious, groundbreaking spring film festival, the acclaimed DOXA Documentary Film Festival, which kicked off last night, and gets fully underway tomorrow, although there’ll be screenings this evening at 6pm of Chilean director Nicolás Molina’s Flow, followed by an 8pm screening of Emmanuelle Antille’s A Bright Light: Karen and the Process, both films screening at The Cinematheque, located at 1131 Howe Street.

DOXA Documentary Film Festival Director of Programming Selina Crammond (left), and DOXA’s Operations & Volunteer Manager, Gina Garenkooper. Photo credit: Milena Salazar.

After a full year of preparing for DOXA 2019, VanRamblings believes that Selina Crammond is deserving of recognition for her critically important work in the arts, and across our community to makes ours a better world, and a more understanding love-based world. Therefore, VanRamblings officially declares today, Friday, May 3rd 2019 Selina Crammond Day (we’re sure our Vancouver City Council will be on board for next year!).

Here are a couple of the DOXA 2019 Programmer’s Picks …

Selina Crammond’s pick …
Midnight Traveler
After receiving threats from the Taliban, filmmaker Hassan Fazili, his wife and their two young daughters are forced to flee their home in Afghanistan and seek refuge in Eastern Europe. Intimate, and often shaky, footage shot by the family on their iPhones captures a wide range of moments, from startling racism in eastern Europe – to meditative reflections on Fazili’s love of cinema. The result is a portrait of a resilient family that offers a very human face to the ongoing refugee crisis.

Hassan Fazili, Emelie Mahdavian | US/Qatar/Canada/UK | 2019 | 87 min.
Saturday, May 11, 2019 - 6:30pm
Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour Street)
Sunday, May 12, 2019 - 6pm
Cinematheque (1131 Howe Street)

Joseph Clark’s pick …
Instructions on Parting
Prepare to be devastated. Instructions on Parting is an emotionally challenging film, that is at once hand-crafted and cinematically stunning. Rarely has such an intimate film demanded to be seen on the big screen.

Amy Jenkins | US | 2018 | 95 minutes
Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - 8pm
Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour Street)

Click here for the DOXA Documentary Film Festival 2019 Twitter account, and hashtag

Click on the graphic above to be taken to the #DOXA2019 Twitter account.

#DOXA2019 will present 82 films from across Canada and around the world, representing the very best in contemporary documentary cinema. Get your tickets at www.doxafestival.ca. Better hurry. Quite a few #DOXA2019 screenings are already sold out, or have limited tickets remaining for the scheduled screenings.
Here’s the full schedule. See ya at #DOXA2019. Bring your dancin’ shoes!

Arts Friday | Diane | Teen Spirit | Finest Films Released This Year

April 26, 2019Cinema, Pop Culture, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

Opening today for an eight day run at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s well-loved Vancity Theatre (on Seymour, just north of Davie Street, and across from Emery Barnes Park), the film considered by many film enthusiasts to be the best 2019 film released in what, to date, has pretty much been a fallow year for those among us who love cinema — and that special film of which we write is Diane, a certain awards winner come year’s end, most especially for the film’s star, Mary Kay Place, who according to Vancity programmer Tom Charity, “gets the role of a lifetime.”
As Variety’s lead film critic Owen Gleiberman writes …

“Diane is a tender, wrenching, beautifully made movie, a haunting first dramatic feature from Kent Jones, and the most accomplished dramatic feature screening at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, a majestic film and a vision of turmoil, peace, mystery and memory, built around Mary Kay Place’s remarkable performance, along with something that hasn’t always accompanied this generation’s journey into old age: a glimpse of God.”

Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells has been raving about Diane since the beginning of the year — seems that he’s not alone in his enthusiasm, what with the 94% Rotten Tomatoes score the film has achieved.
Ty Burr, in the Boston Globe writes that Diane is “a quiet a tour-de-force”.

Part of Mick La Salle’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle reads …

“When I was a kid, my grandfather said something to me that I never forgot and that applies to this movie. ‘I’m 67,’ he said. ‘Twenty years ago, I was still a young man, and now I’m an old man.’ Diane is about something like that. It’s about the experience of early old age, the point in life where the memory and the identity of being young remain as fresh as ever, but the realities of aging are beginning to kick in.”

Some films you want to discover for yourself, without reading too much about it in advance, so that the film is fresh on the screen for you, and the process of discovery and revelation becomes deeply invested in you.
Diane, now screening at The Vancity, is one such film.

Teen Spirit. Starring Elle Fanning.

Teen Spirit, which only a handful of people will see (alas), is VanRamblings favourite film of 2019, and certain to make our year end ‘best of’ list, an entirely revelatory and transformative, if small, British independent film starring the actress of her generation, the luminous Elle Fanning, who unlike Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody actually does her own singing.
Ms. Fanning plays Violet, a sensitive British 17-year-old who lives with her mother (Agnieszka Grochowska), a Polish immigrant, on the Isle of Wight. Aside from a beloved horse and her long disappeared father, not much defines Violet beyond her passion for music.
Violet’s days revolve around school, being mocked by the Island’s pretty-girl jerkettes, a dreary after school job at a local restaurant, helping her financially strapped and sullen mom manage their small family farm, and occasionally sneaking out to sing at a local pub.
Signing up to audition for a British pop show called “Teen Spirit,” director Max Minghella (an actor himself and the son of the late director Anthony Minghella of The English Patient, and The Talented Mr. Ripley) and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw during the film’s 92-minute running allow the audience to witness the beginnings of a young woman’s dreams of music making, giving a reluctant Violet the star treatment.
As Jesse Hassenger writes in his review in Slate …

“Teen Spirit may be about a singing competition, but this raw, slice of life film never devolves into the cynical undertaking you might expect. It’s refreshing, too, that Teen Spirit doesn’t view its heroine exclusively in terms of gatekeeping credibility, nor does it romanticize Violet’s life or the journey she’s on, which is to say that fortunate for us, Teen Spirit never sacrifices complexity on the altar of poptimism.”

Jeanette Catsoulis in her Critics Pick New York Times review writes of Violet, “the music might belong to Robyn and Ellie Goulding, but the journey from insecure child to tentative adult is all hers.”
Playing once daily, at 9:55pm, at Cineplex International Village.

Music & Film | Bedroom Pop, Tribeca and Skate Kitchen

April 25, 2019A & E, Cinema, Diversions, Music, Netflix, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

Bedroom pop. Who’da thunk that such a thing even exists?
Bedroom pop is a sub-genre of Lo-fi (“low fidelity”), defined in 2019 as a DIY musical genre or aesthetic in which artists record at home on their own equipment, rather than in traditional recording spaces, the music characterized by contemplative lyrics, bedroom pop a contemporary indie re-invention of the once popular emo or dream pop musical genres.
There are a great many bedroom pop artists, but the most celebrated is Claire Cottrill (born August 18, 1998), known professionally as Clairo, an American recording artist from Carlisle, Massachusetts who wrote Pretty Girl, a lo-fi-produced song that attracted over 30 million views on YouTube.

At 16 years of age, Clairo wrote and produced Pretty Girl employing studio equipment in her bedroom (the equipment sometimes referred to as a digital audio workstation), as well as Pro Tools production software, while also recording and editing the video before uploading it to YouTube.
Home studios have been popular for decades, but have become ever more refined as computer technology has become increasingly sophisticated, enabling ever higher quality music production. One of VanRamblings favourite artists, Imogen Heap (who we interviewed and wrote about in 1997, at the outset of her career) records all of her music in her kitchen, where she’s set up a home studio that revolves around the use of Pro Tools.

As it happens, VanRamblings discovered bedroom pop during our recent bout of illness, when all we could manage to do most days was plunk ourselves down in front of Netflix — where we were very pleased to see that Crystal Moselle’s acclaimed Sundance and Tribeca award-winning film, Skate Kitchen, simply appeared out of the blue (and unheralded, but not by us) one very fine day, as one of the varied viewing options.

Vibrant, alive, poetic, superby shot and and richly informed, Ms. Moselle’s follow-up to her award-winning, one of a kind documentary, The Wolfpack, her fiction début emerges as the most accomplished film about skater culture since Catherine Hardwicke’s 2005 American biographical drama, The Lords of Dogtown (which is also available on Netflix).
The story goes that Moselle spotted two of the girls on the subway, introduced herself as a filmmaker, and asked if there were more girls like them. Indeed there were, all forming a feminist, sex-positive, shred-happy collective called the Skate Kitchen. Some time later, Moselle’s film arrived in Park City, with all the kids playing a version of themselves.
And who do you think the featured music artist on the soundtrack might be? Yep, you got it — none other than Clairo, who wrote and produced Heaven for the Skate Kitchen soundtrack.

So, while VanRamblings reveled in our discovery of Skate Kitchen on Netflix, we were also introduced to Clairo, and the contemporary musical genre known as “bedroom pop.” And now, you are familiar with Skate Kitchen (a must, must watch!), the work of Crystal Moselle, the musical genre of bedroom pop, and its most acclaimed progenitor, Clairo.
You know what’s exciting about life? That you get to discover something new, something that just yesterday you knew nothing about, every day.

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.