There is nothing we love more than to walk along Spanish Banks, ear phones snuggly tight in our aural canal, powering down the beach listening to beat music remixes to energize our appreciation of the great outdoors.
Dating back to the late 1960s, we have written a regular music column, first for the city wide Vancouver student newspaper, then as arts & review editor of Simon Fraser University’s student newspaper, The Peak, and after that in mainstream media, and since the turn of the century online, both on VanRamblings and a raft of other online non-affiliated online publications.
Today, four of our favourite remixes, which we listen and dance to again and again on our slidey living room floor (and elsewhere) …
Cake | Rhianna | Sweater Beat Remix
Cloud Number 9 | Bryan Adams | Chicane Remix | (long my ringtone)
Need U (100%) | Duke Dumont | Skreamix | (80s funk done up right)
That Thing | Golden Boy | Eton Messy Remix | (thank you Lauryn Hill)
In the coming weeks, VanRamblings will publish a list of our top 20 films of 2019, from Teen Spirit (now available on Amazon Prime) back in February through all the films yet to screen in Vancouver — from Clint Eastwood’s new film, Richard Jewell (December 13) to director Jay Roach’s story of the takedown of Fox News’ Roger Ailes, Bombshell (December 20), plus Greta Gerwig’s all-star cast adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and Sam Mendes’ epic WW1 blockbuster, 1917, both set to open Christmas Day.
Now, two of VanRamblings’ top 20 films of 2019 that demand to be seen … Best Propulsive Good Time Hollywood Popcorn Flick of 2019
The first Hollywood film of 2019 that offers movie patrons a guaranteed good time inside a darkened movie theatre, a film for the whole family, the last film made by 20th Century Fox before they sold the company to Disney, a glorious barn burner of a film redolent with heart-in-mouth and tug-at-the-heart emotion, not only one of the greatest racing movies ever made, but an infectious, engrossing true life drama that features some of the finest onscreen performances of the year, Matt Damon as you’ve never seen him before and Christian Bale sympathetic and at top of form, with a supporting cast who will pull you into this audience-pleasing story like mad.
In other words, a must-see film at the multiplex. And it opens today! Ford v Ferrari is expected to win the weekend box office handily with as much as $31 million at 3,528 venues across the continent (and, likely, another $20+ million in foreign markets over the first weekend, with China and the rest of Asia set to screen Ford v Ferrari in the weeks to come — all of which oughta make the film a solid 2019 Oscar contender). The Disney-Fox film follows an eccentric team of American engineers and designers, led by automotive visionary Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and his British driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who are dispatched by Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) and Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) to build a new vehicle to defeat the dominant Ferrari at the 1966 Le Mans world championship in France.
Click on the graphic above to access reviews for Ford v Ferrari on Rotten Tomatoes
The Probable Best Picture Academy Award Winner for 2019
Opening today for two weeks only in exclusive engagement at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Vancity Theatre on Seymour Street — where advance tickets for the three screenings each day this weekend are already sold old — Martin Scorsese’s gangster opus, the capper of a directorial career that spans fifty years, the film that opened the New York Film Festival to rave reviews, a film that clocks in at 209 minutes that will seem like half that time the film is so enthralling, one of the five films that will garner the most Oscar nominations — a probable Best Picture Academy Award winner come Sunday evening, February 9th — The Irishman is, as Boston Globe critic Ty Burr enthuses, “a masterpiece”, a film Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times says is “the best film of the year and one of the best films of the decade,” and as other critics have written …
… a genuinely new, deeply satisfying, serenely confident film presented with subtlety, wit and resonance, a sumptuous film that tells an epic, extraordinary tale of organized crime’s grip on American life as seen through the eyes of one outwardly ordinary man, a film that is a revelation throughout, intoxicating, history-making cinema, a melancholy eulogy for growing old and losing your humanity, a film to be savoured in every one of its 209 minutes, a knockout story that is surprisingly, surpassingly delicate, told by a master filmmaker with heart and sombre introspection, a film that takes a deep dive into the darkest of souls but manages to remain engaging, lively, funny, full of grace, tender, reflective, mournful, a film of grandeur and bloody memories, a heartbreaking film that presents Joe Pesci as you’ve never seen him before, with superb performances from Al Pacino and Robert De Niro — together for the first time in a Scorsese film — and an absolute must-see at the cinema.”
So, that’s it: two of the best films of 2019, both deserving of your time and scarce dollars, both films (in their own way) epic and unforgettable cinema.
Growing up in the ’60s, in the era of Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound, The Beachboys, The Beatles — and all the groups who were a part of The British Invasion — was to feel vibrant and alive, hopeful for a better world for all, within a revolutionary era of societal change that spanned the globe.
Music served to awaken a younger generation to the possibility of change, to define an era for themselves, and be moved to work collectively for the betterment of society. And as anarchist Emma Goldman was wont to say, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” There was no music better to dance to than the music of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.
An excerpt from Danny Tedesco’s very fine 2008 documentary, The Wrecking Crew, in which Cher, American record producer and recording engineer, Bones Howe, bassist Carol Kaye, drummers Hal Blaine, and more, exclaim about Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound.
To attain the Wall of Sound, Spector’s arrangements called for large ensembles (including some instruments not generally used for ensemble playing, such as electric and acoustic guitars), with multiple instruments doubling or tripling many of the parts to create a fuller, richer tone.
For example, Spector would often duplicate a part played by an acoustic piano with an electric piano and a harpsichord. Mixed well enough, the three instruments would then be indistinguishable to the listener.
Additionally, Spector incorporated an array of orchestral instruments (strings, woodwind, brass and percussion) not previously associated with youth-oriented pop music. Reverb from an echo chamber was highlighted for additional texture, which he characterized as “a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll: little symphonies for the kids”. The intricacies of the technique were unprecedented in the field of sound production for popular music
Imagine being 12 years old, turning on the radio and hearing Darlene Love and The Crystals, The Ronettes, Smoky Robinson and The Miracles, The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, The Zombies, The Righteous Brothers, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Diana Ross and The Supremes, Mary Wells, The Drifters, Chris Montez, Dionne Warwick, Martha and the Vandellas, Otis Redding, Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, and more, so much more — in the early ’60s, the hits really did ‘keep on comin‘, Vancouver’s CKLG part of the musical revolution.
Today on VanRamblings, a musical tribute to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, which in an era of one track studios embodied a revolutionary approach to the recording of music, setting a standard that prevails to this day, in the complex arrangements of your very favourite progressive bands and artists.
From the earliest days of Hollywood, women were stage managed and manipulated by older men in powerful positions. And it remains clear that, although Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, John Lasseter, Luc Besson, among a host of other male predatory Hollywood executives who have been outed, little good has been achieved still for women in the film industry.
In the Hollywood dream factory, trauma surfaces as light entertainment.
In 2013, introducing the list of best supporting actress nominees during the Oscar ceremony, actor and comedian Seth MacFarlane quipped: “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” What was chilling was that no one got the joke. The idea that female stars and aspiring, often young, female stars are required to accept the attentions, at the very least, of older male studio executives, producers and prominent male stars, is as old as the Hollywood hills.
Given the profile that the #MeToo movement has brought to sex discrimination, why does sexism continue to prevail in Hollywood?
According to San Diego State’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women made up only 7 per cent of directors on the top 250 films of 2018, which was actually a 2 per cent decline from 2017. The same study found that while women made up higher percentages of other fields in the industry — 24% of producers, or 17 per cent of editors, for example — they only accounted for 17 per cent of the workforce of all the jobs surveyed. And that too, was a 2 per cent decline from the year before.
The University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL) revealed how sexism is embodied by characters on the silver screen. If female characters are taken out of the plot, it often makes no difference to the story the study found.
Analyzing 1000 scripts, the study found that there were seven times more male than female writers & twelve times more male directors than women.
The biggest impact in counteracting the gender imbalance was if female writers were present at script meetings. If this was the case, female characters on screen was around 50% greater.
Inherent in these observations of the film industry are powerful messages about what it means to be female.
In our “post-feminist” era, where we are frequently told the problems of girls are yesterday’s news — that girls are awash in the largesse of civil rights, and it is boys who really require our attention — it is worthwhile to consider the conduct of male Hollywood writers and executives.
Actress Geena Davis, founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
The problem is so glaring that in 2005, the actress Geena Davis, who would go on to start her own gender institute, commissioned Stacy Smith, a researcher at the University of Southern California, to study the issue and help push the studios beyond the staid male-centred film industry.
From 2007 through 2017, according to Smith’s research, women made up only 30.2% of speaking or named characters in the 100 top-grossing fictional films.
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reports that films featuring women are financially profitable. “Guess what, Hollywood? Female-led films consistently make more money, year over year,” Madeline Di Nonno, the Institutes chief executive has reported to the heads of Hollywood studios.
Hollywood actor Charlize Theron has criticized the movie industry for gender bias. Promoting her film Atomic Blonde, she told feminist Bustle magazine: “Fifteen, ten years ago, it was almost impossible to produce female-driven films, in any genre, just because nobody wanted to make it.”
A quiz that was designed to find out how sexist a film might be was developed by Alison Bechdel and Liz Wallace in 1985. To pass, the film needed three positive answers to these questions: Does it have more than two named female characters? Do those two talk to each other? Is that conversation about something other than a man? The Hollywood Reporter applied the Bechdel-Wallace test to the top-selling movies of 2018, finding that only around half of the films passed the test.
Actress-writer-director Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series, "Girls"
Female directors are in what “Girls” creator Lena Dunham calls “a dark loop.” If they don’t have experience, they can’t get hired, and if they can’t get hired, they can’t get experience. “Without Googling it,” Dunham asked a recent Sundance panel, “Ask anybody to name more than five female filmmakers who’ve made more than three films. It’s shockingly hard.”
The sheer scale of rampant Hollywood sexism is daunting, the stories of what actresses have to put up with disturbing, the tales of pay inequity and pushing for more female-led stories are instructive.
Actress-writer-producer Zoe Kazan, star of the Oscar-nominated film Big Sick, and writer and executive producer of the films, Ruby Sparks and Wildlife (the latter now on Netflix)
Actress Zoe Kazan (The Big Sick) toldIndieWire reporter, Kate Erbland, “There’s so much sexual harassment on set. And there’s no HR department, right? We don’t have a redress. We have our union, but no one ever resorts to that, because you don’t want to get a reputation for being difficult.”
The Oscar winner and star of The Favourite, Rachel Weisz, told Out Magazine that a number of her male co-stars have taken lower salaries in order to match her own. “In my career so far, I’ve needed my male co-stars to take a pay cut so that I may have parity with them,” she said.
Actress Emmy Rossum sounded off during a recent Hollywood Reporter roundtable about her experience with overt sexism in the industry.
“I’ve never been in a situation where somebody asked me to do something really obviously physical in exchange for a job, but even as recently as a year ago, my agent called me and was like, ‘I’m so embarrassed to make this call, but there’s a big movie and they’re going to offer it to you. They really love your work on Shameless. But the director wants you to come into his office in a bikini. There’s no audition. That’s all you have to do.'”
If the dynamic of older men and younger, submissive women greases the wheels of Hollywood production offices repeats itself on screen, it is not an accident, but the desires of the producers and directors who create these films played out on the biggest stage of all: Hollywood cinema, the world’s most effective propaganda machine. Who is Hollywood trying to kid?
