Category Archives: Cinema

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.

Arts Friday | Tom Charity’s Vancity Theatre of Transcendence

May 18, 2018Cinema, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

In Vancouver there is a cinema of beauty, programmed by the indomitable Tom Charity, who has turned the Vancity Theatre into the most successful year-round cinema attached to a film festival, anywhere on the continent.
Tom, an arts journalist of some note and distinction, and as we are wont to say on VanRamblings, a person of conscience — as is our friend Selina Crammond, the chief programming director of the recently-wrapped, and wildly successful 17th annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival — to employ an oft-used phrase, is a “man of the people”, which is to say that he is one of our city’s true social justice heroes, an activist of substance, meaning and involvement in the affairs of our city, our province, our land and the world, and in simple terms on Vancouver’s arts scene, a creative genius.
Since assuming the helm of the Vancity Theatre in 2012 — yet another acute hire by then Festival Director, Alan Franey, now the festival’s Director of International Programming — Tom has found the pulse of Vancouver’s cinema arts-going public, and programmed the Vancity Theatre to a fair thee well, a reflection of his core values of engagement, equity and humanity, and an extension of the empathetic window on the world values of the Vancouver International Film Festival, of which the Vancity is very much a part. If you’ve not been to the Vancity: GO! Attend! You must!

That’s Curtis Woloschuk pictured above, VIFF’s ‘RUPTURE’ series programmer

Tom points out that it is not he, but another creative genius (VanRamblings’ wording, but only because it is true!) who is responsible for the inaugural edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s RUPTURE series — which, if we had our wits about us, we would have figured out on our own … alas — the one, the only, the very huggable collective hope of our future and Associate Director of Programming at VIFF, Curtis Woloschuk, who has long programmed VIFF’s Altered States (or ALT, if you will) programming, an amalgam of “international genre films come out to play” (read: films that are a little off-centre), having assumed that responsibility when VIFF’s Sandy Gow turned his focus to programming VIFF’s absolutely stunningly beautiful Shorts Programme — a part of VIFF you should never, ever miss.
On Arts Friday, a preview of the upcoming programming at the Vancity …

Débuting last December at the 17th annual Whistler Film Festival, film critic Lucy Lau writing in The Straight says of Venus …

A feel-good film that admirably defies the conventions of white, straight, and cis-gendered Hollywood, Venus tells the tale of Sid (played dazzlingly by Debargo Sanyal), a transitioning woman whose life takes a surprising turn when Ralph (Jamie Mayers), the 14-year-old biological son she never knew she had, shows up unannounced at her door” … ending her review with, “Heartwarming and an absolute delight to watch — with an infectious bilingual soundtrack, to boot.

Venus will play at the Vancity, as is usually the case at the idiosyncratic and successful Vancity Theatre, on six occasions, beginning tonight, ending next Wednesday, May 23rd. Screening times may be found by clicking here.

Advance tickets for Ma vie de courgette are sold out, but if you get down to the Vancity by 11:30am, there may be some standby tickets available.
Check out the full programme of Vancity screenings this and next month.
Next Saturday, there is what VanRamblings considers to be a very special event occurring at the Vancity, followed by a Sunday once only screening of a film that took Sundance by storm this past January.

Filmmaker David Lowery ready for his Creator Talk at the Vancity Theatre on May 26th

Here’s the Vancity programme on next Saturday’s ‘Creator Talk’ event …

The Vancouver International Film Festival is thrilled to welcome David Lowery back to our city for the inaugural edition of Rupture (May 24-27), a celebration of films that bend rules, blend genres and uncover innovative takes on venerable tropes. David has always been refreshingly forthcoming with his daily routine as a filmmaker and we look forward to our conversation with him as he shares his insights into a unique creative process that has sent him on a trajectory from beautifully handcrafted short films to an astonishing assured indie début (the lyrical, fatalistic Ain’t The Bodies Saints) to an inspired re-imagining of a storied Disney property (Pete’s Dragon, one of VanRamblings’ three favourite films of 2016) to setting out to make the idiosyncratic A Ghost Story that, in wowing the critics, became a fixture on a surfeit of Best of 2017 lists.

Tickets for the Telus STORYHIVE Creator Talk with David Lowery are still available — Curtis advises that you should go, immediately, to the VIFF website, and click this link to order your tickets to the “you’ll regret it if you miss it (our words),” Creator Talk with David Lowery! Tickets are only $20.

Tickets are still available for Damsel, starring Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska — otherwise known as ‘the’ actress of her generation. Here’s what Owen Gleiberman had to say in his Variety review …

A mega-deadpan Western comedy starring Robert Pattinson as a cracker-barrel hero on a romantic mission – who hits the perfect note of drawling flaked-out good cheer – set to marry his beloved financée, Penelope (Mia Wasikowska), but things go awry.

Penelope turns out to be the toughest character in the movie: a righteous and self-protective post-feminist Calamity Jane, who takes out her bent shotgun and uses it only because of how badly she’s been wronged. She has no patience for any man who would destroy her happiness. Wasikowska, under a chopped wedge of blonde hair, gives her true grit; her straight-shooter line readings are punchlines of rationality. She’s as alone in the world as any of the other characters, but she’s the one who won’t be dragged down.

See Damsel at the Vancity on Sunday, May 27th, or miss out on it forever.

DOXA Documentary Film Festival | A Window on Our World

May 4, 2018Cinema, VancouverRaymond Tomlin

The 17th annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival kicked off Thursday evening with a raucous and jam-packed sold-out screening of filmmaker Teresa Alfeld’s indispensable chronicle of Vancouver’s most beloved City Councillor ever, the lauded première of Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical.
The second DOXA 2018 screening of Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical, scheduled for this upcoming Tuesday — sad to report — is also sold-out.
Fortunately, for those who were not able to secure a ticket to Alfeld’s wildly popular DOXA 2018 opening nignt film, the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre programmer, Tom Charity, has booked two additional screenings of the film, in early June, with tickets available here.
Of course, every cinéaste in town, every person of conscience who knows how critically important it is to support the arts in Vancouver, and to remind ourselves in the most compelling way possible — through film and the window on our world independently-made cinema presents to us — knows how important it is to turn up for the DOXA Documentary Film Festival. All of which means, that if you haven’t booked your tickets, Festival Pass, ticket pack or Industry pass, you’ll want to do so now by clicking right here!

The first question VanRamblings is asked by any filmgoer planning to attend one or another of our town’s many film festivals is: what do you recommend, what’s worth seeing, where do I start?
Well, Shawn Conner — long one of our town’s most-respected arts critics — in an article written for and published on Inside Vancouver, has found five DOXA films that you just shouldn’t miss. Otherwise, DOXA 2018’s incomparable Programme Director, Selina Hammond — one of our town’s very best people, an activist (and lover of cinema) of the first order presents a few stirling ideas for you, as to where you might turn your attention between now, and DOXA 2018’s end date, Sunday, May 13th.

“At DOXA, we pride ourselves on programming independent documentaries and unique voices.

In 2018, I would like to highlight for your readers our FRENCH FRENCH programme, another spectacular programme this year, curated for the fourth consecutive year by Thierry Gorel. This year, DOXA’s Spotlight French Programme is dedicated to the work of Alain Cavalier.

Cavalier, was awarded the Maître du Réel (Master of the Réel) at the Visions du Réel Film Festival last year, as a renowned member of the Nouvelle Vague. At DOXA 2018, we’re presenting six Cavalier shorts, 13-minute beautifully observed mini vignettes of the most elegant and intimate kind, focusing on women and trades, which are paired with his latest film — which, by the way, is a North American première — Six Portraits XL, created from material Cavalier filmed of six different friends over the course of many years.

There are also several new French documentaries by women directors that are amazing. Secret Nest is one of my favourites, The Neighbours is also quite lovely, and very much worth catching. We are fortunate this year to have the directors of both films at DOXA 2018, Sophie Bredier and Ruth Zylberman, respectively, will who will present the screenings of their films, and afterwards engage in a Q&A with the audience.

For many years, Ms. Crammond — who as we’ve written above — loves film, and in consequence has worked with the good folks who bring us the Vancouver International Film Festival each autumn, where a much-looked-forward-to highlight of VIFF’s programme are the “shorts” lovingly curated by Sandy Gow. Such, musta rubbed off on Selina Crammond, cuz …

“As is the case every year, if folks are looking to gain an inside track on filmmakers on the verge of worldwide feature film recognition, DOXA’s shorts programme just can’t be beat, each year and again this year challenging the viewer with groupings of the most humane and provocative films you’ll find inside of a darkened movie theatre.

Shifting Worlds includes some beautiful work, as does Framing Landscapes, and the Rethinking Representation shorts programme.

In Vancouver, we don’t really have a proper venue for filmmakers working in different lengths. The various elements of DOXA’s shorts programme presents an opportunity for the work of great filmmakers to shine, and an opportunity for filmgoers to be blown away, always the best part of attending one of our town’s many film festivals, don’t you think?”

Well more than 100 films, lovingly curated by an activist, democratically-inspired programming group, and the one opportunity that you’ll get this year to attend western Canada’s première non-fiction film festival.
DOXA 2018. Requires your support. Get your tickets now. See ya at DOXA!

Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical | Vancouver’s Cherished Politico

May 2, 2018BC Politics, Cinema, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018Raymond Tomlin

Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical
Première of Teresa Alfeld’s new documentary film
17th annual DOXA Documentary Film Festival
Thursday, May 3rd, 2018, at 7pm
Venue: The Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton Street, just off Dunsmuir
SOLD OUT DÉBUT SCREENING
Tickets still available for the Tuesday, May 8th repeat screening

Cantankerous, opinionated, possessed of a pithy and often biting sense of humour — particularly around the Vancouver City Council table, where he sat, but more often stood on his feet, championing the interests of working people and the most vulnerable among us, the nemesis of veteran, ‘right-of-centre’ Vancouver Non-Partisan Association City Councillor George Puil (seeing the two of them go toe-to-toe in Council chambers was to witness transcendence and deliverance on Earth) who, if the whole truth be known, loved Harry Rankin as much as the rest of us (if not more), which is to say almost to distraction, for Harry Rankin was a charismatic figure who every Vancouver citizen loved — absolutely adored — as a great orator and champion of the public interest, whose often boisterous conduct at Council was tempered with a huge dollop of humility, and inveterate good cheer.
Harry, who died at the age of 82, on February 26th 2002 — his passing mourned by everyone who ever knew, or knew of, him — ran for civic office more than a dozen times before being elected to Vancouver City Council in 1966 as the sole independent “alderman”, as elected officials were called back then, sitting as the lone voice and soul champion of working people in Vancouver, on a City Council that was dominated by the corporate-minded, and ultra-conservative Non-Partisan Association.
In 1968, Harry was instrumental in co-founding — along with the Vancouver & District Labour Council — the Committee (now, Coalition) of Progressive Electors (COPE), who this year celebrate 50 years of championing the interests of working people, and the vulnerable among us, a legacy of caring among progressive political parties in Vancouver which has no equal. Teresa Alfeld’s new documentary on the legacy of Harry Rankin, offers a fitting tribute to a champion of the people, a political figure for whom most held great affection, others seeing him as “polarizing.”
In her interview with Ms. Alfeld, veteran PostMedia arts critic Dana Gee writes that “while the film outlines all Harry Rankin’s social causes and policies, the film doesn’t mythologize him to the point of revisionist history. There is no shying away from Rankin’s sexist views, views that had him once call fellow Councillor, a member of the NPA, Helen Boyce, “stupid.”

“As a feminist filmmaker of course I am disappointed, but I am not surprised. We work with it. We don’t shy away, and we don’t pretend things were different because we love Harry and we love his politics,” filmmaker Teresa Alfeld stated to Ms. Gee is the course of her interview.

So, yes, Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical is not hagiography, but as Ms. Alfeld avers …

“I think 2018 is the year to see this film and to understand as citizens we have a choice and a responsibility to get involved and to think about the kind of city that we want to live in.”

Although Thursday’s début screening of Ms. Alfeld’s film is sold out, there is one final DOXA screening of Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical on Tuesday, tickets available by clicking the link at the top of today’s post.

Perhaps it is fitting that the final word on the making of Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical should be given to the person who played a central role in getting the film made, retired Park Board Commissioner and Vancouver City Councillor Tim Louis, who raised the funds necessary for Teresa Alfeld to spend two years of her life in the making of a film, which — along with the invaluable contribution of Phil Rankin, whose Vancouver law practice is much in the tradition of his celebrated lawyer father, and who along with many others, including the work of Peter Smilksy, who gathered together clippings & memorabilia during Harry’s 1986 candidacy for Mayor, shooting 33 reels of 16mm film, with the intent of making a documentary in 1986 — along with the monetary contributions of good people, made the début of DOXA’s screening of Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical possible.
Here, then, is political activist Tim Louis, on his friend Harry Rankin …

“Harry played a key role in my decision to go to law school – intervening on my behalf with the university, and supportive through all my years at UBC Law School, bringing me into his office as an articling law student near the end of my university days, and hiring me following my graduation from law school. Throughout the 20+ years I knew and worked with Harry, up until the time of his passing in 2002, and throughout the early years of his mentorship of me when I worked long hours with Harry in his law office just off Gastown, Harry politicized me — and in consequence, and I say this unabashedly, Harry is responsible for my political career.

In my time on Park Board, in the 1990s, and as a Vancouver City Councillor and Finance Committee Chair on the majority, progressive COPE 2002 – 2005 Vancouver City Council, I adhered to the advice Harry gave me early on in my political career …

“Don’t waffle. Get to the point. See past all the bafflegab.” Harry taught me to always treat the public with respect, because at the end of the day, it is the public, the working people of our city, who are the employers of the elected officials who sit at the Council table, in the Park Board meeting room, or in the large meeting room at the Vancouver School Board.”

Harry Rankin’s Political Legacy

“Harry’s legacy to the citizens of Vancouver remains to this day the acknowldegment that we, as citizens of Vancouver, have an obligation to care for one another, to care for all of our neighbours, every one of us resident in any one of the 23 neighbourhoods that make Vancouver the welcoming and diverse city that is has become.

Harry’s success as a political figure in the history of British Columbia, and Vancouver city governance, was due in no small part to the role he played in championing and giving voice to the interests of working families and children, and the vulnerable among us.”

If you don’t have a ticket for Thursday’s début screening of Harry Rankin: Legacy of a Radical, VanRamblings urges you to attend DOXA’s second and final screening of the film, this upcoming Tuesday, May 8th at 6pm, at SFU Goldcorp Theatre, adjacent to the Woodward’s building downtown.