As we continue to update our daily amalgam of social media interests, our RebelMouse page — and given that we’re the COPE Parks Committee official twitterer — with tweets about Park Board (there’s a great article by former Park Board Commissioner Stuart Mackinnon about Vision Vancouver’s unholy grab of community centre monies that is a must-read) and, just generally, political tweets of one sort or another. As a conseqence, we’ve tended to neglect our VanRamblings, what with this new ‘toy’ of ours.
But it’s back to VanRamblings today, if only briefly.
For those who love film, who consider film to be the art of our age, the autumn movie season is just about as close to heaven as we will come during our time on this Earth — of course, love, our family, our significant other, outstrips film on our ‘as close to heaven’ list, but when it comes to art, for us it is film which moves us, generates thought, and dialogue with those with whom we feel the closest kinship.
As we’ve mentioned previously, we love the ballet — and will be attending all Ballet BC’s performances this season. Of course, we feel much the same about our première summer festival, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, and reading, whether it be on our Kindle or iPad mini, or simply curling up in bed with a good paperback classic. We are not limited in our appreciation of art, it’s just that film remains a primary interest, and means a great deal to us.
To the ‘under the radar’ film of the latter part of the week, then …
The Sapphires, dir. Wayne Blair, w/ Chris O’Dowd, Deborah Mailman

Having wowed audiences at Cannes, this past May, and setting box office records in Australia (it’s country of origin) when it opened there this past August, The Sapphires was recently picked up for North American distribution by the Weinstein Company. Originally set for a holiday season release, given that the Weinstein Company is overloaded with Oscar calibre holiday season releases — Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, David O. Russell’s, Silver Lining Playbook, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained — we may or may not get to see this rousing rock ‘n roll period piece, the 1968 set, down under aboriginal Supremes-like story, or as Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells put it, a “high-throttle razzmatzzy Dreamgirls that I liked better.” High praise indeed from the curmudgeonly Mr. Wells.
Screen Daily chief film critic Mark Adams says this about The Sapphires …

“An energetic, amusing and resolutely feel-good-film-with-a-message, 1960s music movie The Sapphires ticks all of the right boxes to click with audiences as well as being a smart advert for Aussie girl power. It is a film with soul at its heart and some great tunes to back up its simple — and rather old-fashioned — story to great effect.”

Megan Lehmann in The Hollywood Reporter writes …

“A sparkling début for first-time filmmaker Wayne Blair, The Sapphires offers an exuberant celebration of Aboriginality that fizzes with humour and heart, its soulfulness going beyond the embrace of a jukebox full of Motown, Stax and Atlantic Records hits. The festive crowd at its out-of-competition midnight screening in Cannes agreed, giving the film a 10-minute standing ovation. Racial prejudice, social upheaval and the reverberating shockwaves of the Vietnam War are all there in Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs’ screenplay — based on a play Briggs wrote in 2005 about his mother and three aunts and their true-life journey from a far-flung Australian mission to war-torn Vietnam to sing for the American troops in 1969 — although the political is largely eschewed for the personal, the mood determinedly upbeat throughout.”

With all of the heavier fare due out this holiday season, audiences will need a respite from the more serious-minded Oscar films. The Sapphires may very well fit the bill. We’ll just have to wait for a release date for the film.

Today we continue with our recitation of upcoming holiday films, those serious-minded Oscar films Hollywood’s major studios have waited until now to release. First up today, a boomer generation story set in New Jersey, the film tracking a young man as he makes his way through love, sex, drugs and, yes, rock ‘n roll in the early-to-mid 1960s.
Not Fade Away, dir. David Chase, w/ John Magaro & Bella Heathcote
Here’s what Variety’s Ronnie Scheib had to say about Not Fade Away when it débuted at the New York Film Festival earlier in the month …

Music not only serves as the subject but informs the very fabric of David Chase’s savvy ’60s-set film. Aided immeasurably by his keen ear for dialogue, Chase filters a suddenly tumultuous, transformative decade through the restrictive prism of conservative suburbia in his feature film début story of a New Jersey boy’s coming of age, as political instability, class awareness and rock ‘n’ roll break in waves over the still-inchoate consciousness of several friends trying to form a band. Though starless (John Magaro, Bella Heathcote and Jack Huston play central roles), save for James Gandolfini’s knockout supporting performance, this dynamic pic should resonate with audiences upon its December 21st release.

The Village Voice’s Nick Schrager is equally high on the film, writing …

Rock ‘n roll proves the coming-of-age crucible for a young teen in 1960s New Jersey in Not Fade Away, Sopranos creator David Chase’s semi-autobiographical feature of shaggy hair, shagadelic beauties, and the joy and sorrow wrought from chasing, and failing to achieve, one’s dreams. Treating its characters with just the right balance of gravity and sense of humour, respecting their earnest sincerity and yet pricking them for their prejudices and pretensions, the film achieves a tonal balance that turns the material reflective without ever becoming cloying. This is never more apparent, or affecting, than in a quiet dinner scene between father and son, the father’s revelations about past romances beautifully conveying the material’s simultaneously sad and hopeful — and, thus, mature — belief that, for better and worse, some loves must be lost so that others may be found.

Kris Tapley, at In Contention, says, “Chase captures the joy and passion of the era, in a film that is both funny and, at times, profound,” while David Rooney at The Hollywood Reporter writes that the film offers a “bittersweet glance back at the rock-fueled restlessness of the Sixties, the film a music-infused personal reflection, and a warm, funny, poignant scrapbook that evokes a spirit of youth that is still relatable in later eras.”

Producer/music supervisor on the film is the E-Street Band’s Steven van Zandt. Not Fade Away will open in Vancouver on Friday, December 21st.
Update, from Paramount: As it’s a ‘platform release’, Not Fade Away will open in Vancouver a week, or two later, than the December 21st date.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” — Jack Kerouac, On the Road

On The Road, dir. Walter Salles, w/ Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund

If Not Fade Away is the under the radar nostalgia film this upcoming holiday season, the film that took Cannes by storm this past May, Walter Salles’ On the Road, with its all-star cast of Hollywood’s finest young talent — Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Elizabeth Moss, and Tom Sturridge, not to mention such indie stalwarts as Amy Adams, Viggo Mortenson, Steve Buscemi, Alice Braga, Terrence Howard and Michael Sarrazin — here’s a film that will hit theatres early in 2013 (although it’ll do a New York / Los Angeles Oscar qualifying run in December) that is all but guaranteed to be the indie blockbuster of the Oscar season, with a reported rock solid nod for Kristen Stewart as Best Supporting Actress.

Philip French, film critic for The Observer, had this to say about On The Road when it opened in Cannes, “Years in the making, Walter Salles’ movie adaptation of Kerouac’s beat classic — some five years in the making — is a bold, affecting, inherently sad and faithful adaptation of the literary sensation of 1957.” French goes on to write …

Salles and his screenwriter José Rivera give shape to what many have seen — wrongly I think — as a rambling, incoherent narrative. They make powerfully affecting the final break between a dispirited Moriarty, who meets up with a newly confident, smartly dressed Sal Paradise just off to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera. Ultimately a rather sad film, as most road movies are, because the restless travelling life can never bring peace and contentment, as Kris Kristofferson’s wrote in his great song about life on the road: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Film critic Tim Robey in his four star review The Observer has this to say …

An alluring and honest treatment of Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, Walter Salles’ adaptation of On the Road is rambling, episodic, aimless, vague. You can throw all of these words at Walter Salles’ film — many did when it premièred at Cannes, in a longer version than the cut now released. They might sound like criticisms, but they are the point. The movie can’t help but ramble if it wants to honour the whole ethos of Jack Kerouac’s 1957 Beatnik travelogue, but it isn’t shy about weighing up his achievement, either. It’s partly a gorgeous and textured film of his book, partly a hidden biopic about why he wrote it. The supporting cast is tremendous: Kristen Stewart’s restless child-bride, Viggo Mortensen’s Burroughs surrogate and Kirsten Dunst’s trapped Camille all make vivid impressions, as does Tom Sturridge’s funny, lonely Carlo (the Ginsberg figure). Out in front, Hedlund is a gritty revelation, desperate and magnetic. Dean’s constant need for sex is understood as a sign of damage, part of the same compulsion that sends him all over America, bouncing between wives. Working with the wonderful French cinematographer Eric Gautier (Into The Wild), Salles summons a twilit America where wanderlust is an ache, an addiction, and a kind of madness, a tempting vortex to disappear into, for these rootless young people bored by the conventional options of living.

Either this film is made for you, or it’s not. For VanRamblings, we can tell you that we’ll search out On the Road on its opening day in Vancouver.

Some days you just kind of get flustered. I mean, I may be 62 years of age, have been through a lot, seen a great deal, and at my advanced age there should probably not be much that would contribute to a sense of disorientation in my life, cause me to become flustered. But today, a good day, I am a flustered. What that means for this post, we’ll just have to see.
Where to start? Oh, I know. How about with VIFF?
One of my very favourite documentary films to screen at this year’s 31st annual Vancouver International Film Festival was Mirjam von Arx’s extraordinarily moving and, for me, entirely entrancing, new film, Virgin Tales. Who knew while VIFF was in full swing that the fine folks at the public broadcasting corporation, our very own and often transcendently wonderful CBC, would — through the auspices of The Passionate Eye — broadcast Virgin Tales, just after VIFF ended, Sunday, October 21st? But they did.
And you know what? CBC’s News’ The Passionate Eye will re-broadcast Virgin Tales — a must-see television broadcast it there ever was one — on Saturday and Sunday, November 3rd and 4th, at 10pm ET/PT. Can’t wait to see Virgin Tales when it’s re-broadcast next month? Have I got news for you. CBC is streaming Virgin Tales (full version available in Canada only).
Great doc. Broadcast on the people’s network. Recordable on your PVR if you’re out for the evening. A can’t miss, absolute must-see non-fiction film, in the comfort of your own home. Does life get any better than that?

You know what one of the great thing about getting old is? Reflecting on your life, healing rifts, not getting too excited by those slings and arrows of poor misfortune that sometimes invade the quiet enjoyment of our lives. Perhaps the prematurely mature get there early on in their lives, but aside from those preternaturally few, for most of us, it’s a process.
Director Steven Spielberg has had a process, a process of reconciliation — thanks in large measure to the insistent demand of his wife, Kate Capshaw.
On Sunday, Mr. Spielberg was featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes (above). You’d think he’d appear on the venerable programme to promote his new, Oscar-bound film, Lincoln. You’d be only partially right in assuming so. Instead, much of the interview, and the focus of the segment, is given over to the recovery of Spielberg’s estranged relationship — 30 years and no contact — and reconciliation, with his father Arnold, a workaholic engineer. Definitely worth watching. And instructive, too. Sort of in the same vein as Sarah’s Polley’s ground-breaking, truth-telling new film, Stories We Tell.

There’s more we could write about today. Like about how much we were disoriented by Paul Thomas Anderson’s smashing new pic, The Master, and of how much the camera loves Joaquin Phoenix, recording every crag in his weathered face, recording too all of the insanity that lays within a clearly troubled, artistic soul. We understand why Joaquin Phoenix thinks the whole Oscar merry-go-round is “bullshit, total utter bullshit, and I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t believe in it. It’s a carrot, but it’s the worst-tasting carrot I’ve ever tasted in my whole life. I don’t want this carrot.”
For Phoenix to go on the Harvey Weinstein, glad-handing Oscar promotion tour would be to deny what he and Paul Thomas Anderson have created in The Master: a work of art, an undeniable, unassailable work of art.

Or we could write about Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson’s film podcast, Oscar Talk, currently the only informed, close-to-passionate, certainly erudite film podcast remaining. We’ll be writing an open letter to Jeffrey Wells and Sasha Stone about reconciling, in order that they might continue on with the best, the most original, always provocative, political, feminist, out there, curmudgeonly, argumentative and downright lovely podcast. Jeff and Sasha think their days with Oscar Poker are over. We think differently.
Until Jeff and Sasha come to their senses, Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson are the only close-to-listenable ‘authorities‘ on film, and the coming Oscar season. So, not only do I suggest that you make a perusing of Thompson on Hollywood and In Contention a daily must activity, I would also insist that you listen to the podcast. You’ve got iTunes, right? Easily accessible. You’ll thank me for it later, believe me. Oscar Talk. For any serious movie aficionado, Oscar Talk, each autumn and early new year, is a must-listen.