Category Archives: Media

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 | Creating Quite the Stir at Vancouver’s Film Festival

September 30, 2020A & E, Cinema, Media, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VIFF 2020Raymond Tomlin

There’s a new online arts & culture magazine in Vancouver that’s creating quite the stir. Staffed mostly by former (and recent) arts staff at The Georgia Straight — said the weekly’s new owners, MediaCentral (a condition of employment: management must show their horns at all times) “Nah, we’re not cutting arts coverage. We’re just rationalizing it, by dumping a whole lotta staff, and refocusing editorial categories by eliminating any focus whatsoever on venues and the arts”) — the glorious new Stir is the illustrious new home for arts & culture coverage in our city.
Where to find beloved Straight arts & entertainment editor, the kindly but tough Janet Smith, or bon vivant, Adrian Mack, and acclaimed journalist, Gail Johnson? Vancouver’s nascent Stir magazine is the place where you’ll find Janet, Adrian and Gail, as well as a number of other former Straight staffers, and first-rate British Columbia-based arts & culture journalists, who in Stir have created the place to be for arts coverage in our city.
And isn’t that what makes a city, culture? Otherwise, what are we but an amalgam of greenhouse gas spewing towers, and windy roads laden with too many carbon emitting vehicles. Vancouver’s many and varied arts & culture institutions breathe life and meaning into our paradise by the ocean.

In 2020, at the virtual Vancouver International Film Festival, Stir has emerged as the place for coverage of VIFF 2020.
For instance, in her enthusiastic review of Jimmy Carter: Roll and Roll President (which VanRamblings just loved when we screened it at 3 a.m. yesterday morning), Ms. Smith writes …

Jimmy Carter was cooler than you ever knew — even more so when he’s put up against the presidential candidates for the 2020 U.S. election. Turns out the man once derided as the Peanut Farmer was besties with the likes of Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, both of whom sing his praises here. He also hosted regular concerts, first at the guv’nah’s mansion in Georgia, and later at the White House, after the Allmann Brothers helped propel him to election. In her fun, well-researched, and zippily edited documentary, director Mary Wharton connects Carter’s open-minded approach to music to his political achievements.

The review above is just one of many VIFF 2020 reviews you’ll find on the Stir Vancouver online website, from Janet Smith, Adrian Mack and Gail Johnson, in 2020, your go-to website for Vancouver’s finest VIFF coverage.
Here’s hoping Stir thrives long, long into the future, that Ottawa’s modernized Canadian Periodical Fund provides sustaining monies to aid Stir in its necessary endeavours, and that readers (and advertisers) flock by the thousands to Stir Vancouver, such that Stir becomes a west coast institution, a Canadian version of New York Magazine’s Vulture website.

Arts Friday | Netflix and the Death of the Theatrical Experience

May 10, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Diversions, Media, Netflix, Pop Culture, Television, Video & DVD, Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

With movie theatre attendance at a two-decade low and profits dwindling, with revenues hovering slightly above $10 billion, Hollywood is on the verge of experiencing the kind of disruption that hit the music, publishing, and related cultural industries a decade ago and more.
Hollywood once ruled the world with must-see movies that would entice people to head to the nearest cinema every weekend. But movie crowds have been declining as more people opt to “Netflix”, and chill at home.
Like other industries, entertainment is feeling the shock of technology and scrambling to adapt to sharply shifting economics. Studios are increasingly banking on big-budget franchise films to bring in bucks. But is that enough?
Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz considered those issues in his book, The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies.

“Netflix is having a massive impact on Hollywood,” Fritz writes. “They’re disrupting all the traditional economics of television and movies. It’s inescapable how much Netflix has become the TV diet for so many people. Now it’s happening to movies.”

“The movie industry is going through what the record industry has gone through. Subscription streaming is changing the movie business. The music business has had to adapt to people streaming, and that’s going to happen in the movie business. A lot of traditionalists are saying, ‘No, a movie is made to be seen in a theatre.’ That may be what Hollywood wants, but that is not what a lot of consumers want.”

As we wrote in a column published in 2018, in recent years Hollywood has been gun shy about producing romantic comedies.

Netflix, though, has proven just how durable the romcom formula is.
When Lara Condon and Noah Centineo’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before débuted last August, it set Netflix streaming records, with over 45 million viewers tuning in. Needless to say, a sequel will be released later this year, as is the case with Joey King’s breakout hit, The Kissing Booth.
Meanwhile, Rose McIver’s The Christmas Prince also spawned a much-anticipated sequel on Netflix this past holiday season.
In 2019, Netflix is set to spend around $18 billion on original programming, most of which is slated for movie production and documentaries, consisting of a 121 movie and documentary slate. Warner Bros.will release 23 films this year, while Disney (Hollywood’s most profitable studio) will début a mere 10. All the Hollywood studios combined in 2019 won’t spend $18 billion on production, and will release only a mere fraction of Netflix’s titles.
Looking into the financial crystal ball, investment firm Goldman Sachs predicts that Netflix could have an annual spending budget of $22.5 billion in 2022, a staggering number that would see Netflix far outstrip the total spending by all of the Hollywood movie studios combined.
With Netflix boasting 139 million subscribers, and growing by millions every month, according to tech mogul Barry Diller, a former senior member of the executive team at Paramount and 20th Century Fox and current Chairman of the Expedia group, “Hollywood is now irrelevant.”

Having disrupted the model for TV broadcasters by making schedules extraneous and grabbing millions of viewers at the same time, Netflix is now making a run at Hollywood. “I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch,” says US journalist Gina Keating, author of Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs.
Netflix’s deep pockets have lured Hollywood stars such as Will Smith (Bright), Joel Edgerton, Sandra Bullock (Bird Box), Ben Affleck (Triple Frontier), Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson (The Highwaymen), Anne Hathaway, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel, the latter three of whom will star in Martin Scorcese’s $150 million epic, The Irishman, arriving day and date on Netflix and a handful of theatres across the continent this upcoming autumn season, just in time for the Oscars.
And talking about the Oscars, Netflix’s Roma won a slew of Oscars this past Ocotber, winning Best Director, Cinematographer and Foreign Language Film for Alfonso Cuarón, while Period, End of Sentence won Best Documentary. Both films have been available on Netflix since December.
Although Netflix has been around for over two decades, the company’s rise to the top of Hollywood happened in a remarkably short period of time.
House of Cards, Neflix’s first foray into original content, débuted only six years ago. By expending monies to produce more shows and movies, it has managed to grow so rapidly that even its own executives are surprised.

“We’ve outperformed the business in a way we didn’t predict,” David Wells, Netflix’s (now former) chief financial officer, told The Hollywood Reporter in late February, after the company announced that its subscriber base had increased by over seven million in the first two months of 2019, its largest increase ever.

While Hollywood could take control of its fate, it’s very difficult for mature businesses — ones that have operated in similar ways for decades and where the top players have entrenched interests — to embrace change.
One can imagine the future looking something like this: You come home (in a driverless car) and say aloud to Alexa, Siri, Google Home or some A.I. assistant that doesn’t exist yet, “I want to watch a comedy with two female actors as the leads.” Alexa responds, “O.K., but you have to be at dinner at 8pm. Should I make the movie one hour long?” “Sure, that sounds good.” Then you’ll sit down to watch on a screen that resembles digital wallpaper.
At the Consumer Electronics Show this year Samsung débuted a flexible display that rolls up like paper.
There are other, more dystopian theories which predict that film and video games will merge, and we will become actors in a movie, reading lines or being told to “look out!” as an exploding car comes hurtling in our direction, not too dissimilar from Mildred Montag’s evening rituals in Fahrenheit 451.
When we finally get there, you can be sure of two things.
The bad news is that many of the people on the set of a standard Hollywood production won’t have a job anymore. The good news?
You’ll never be bored again.

Arts Friday | Netflix | A Millennial Redefinition of Pop Culture

October 26, 2018A & E, Media, Netflix, Pop Culture, TelevisionRaymond Tomlin

Yesterday at noon, VanRamblings had lunch with eastside activist Jak King.
A short ways into the conversation, Jak raised the topic of The Bodyguard, Britain’s biggest TV hit in years, attracting a record 17.1 million viewers for each episode of the crime series’ 6 episodes, now available on Netflix. Once Jak had read The Guardian’s five-star review of The Bodyguard, he set about to binge-watch the first five episodes of the hit BBC TV series.

Richard Madden as David Budd and Keeley Hawes as the home secretary, Julia Montague

The previous evening, meaning to take a brief break from our writing, we checked into the propulsive series, finding ourselves transfixed.

And that’s the way it is with Netflix, the must-have streaming service.
Eleven thousand first run films are available on Netflix, 20% of which are made in-house by Netflix (that figure will rise to 80% by 2020), with 7,500 TV series from across the globe available for your viewing pleasure 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No wonder Netflix won an unprecedented 23 Emmy’s at this year’s Academy of Television Arts & Sciences ceremony.

Netflix will début 57 new original shows and movies in November.

September and October of this year were two of the most impressive months Netflix subscribers have ever experienced when it comes to Netflix’s original content — including Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Maniac, just one of 52 different original shows and movies released by Netflix in September.
Débuting today on the Netflix streaming service, just in time for Hallowe’en, the well-reviewed The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, starring the heart of the AMC TV series Mad Men, Kiernan Shipka, as the titular teenage witch, the updated story a far cry from the days of Melissa Joan Hart’s frothy TV sitcom, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the new story something to scream about wrapped as it is in a moody, dark, funny, and stylishly atmospheric package that could be not be a better herald of fall and the Halloween season. Definitely a series to binge & watch with friends.
In addition to the horror genre (The Haunting of Hill House débuted earlier in the month), Netflix has also become the home of a genre of film that once was a Hollywood staple: romantic comedies, those mid-range cost films that generally found an audience, largely female, that Hollywood no longer seems to be interested in. Thank goodness, then, that Netflix has stepped up to the plate.

In August, the neglected genre was brought to new life with the streaming hits Set It Up, The Kissing Booth and To All The Boys I Loved Before, the latter (made in B.C.) an online sensation, featuring two winning new stars, Lana Condor & Noah Centineo, making legions of new fans not only for the young stars, whose careers have catapulted into the stratosphere, but for Netflix, which continues to gain a half million new subscribers each month.
Whatever your favourite film genre — action adventure, sci-fi / speculative fiction, foreign film, Oscar winners, British films, animation, family & children’s films, classic movies, crime thrillers, faith and spirituality, film noir, indie films, plus another 100 film genres — Netflix has you covered. Starting at only $8.99 a month that makes for not a bad film lovers deal.