Category Archives: Pop Culture

#OscarWatch | The Late Summer / Fall Film Festival Season Is Almost Upon Us

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Each late summer / early autumn brings the four major film festivals where 80% of the future Oscar contenders for the year début.

First up, there’s the Telluride Film Festival, high atop the mountains of Colorado, that gets underway at the end of August, where 40+ prestige films will make their début, from Friday, August 30th through Sunday, September 2nd. Organizers keep the titles of the films set to début under wraps until opening day.

Occurring almost simultaneously: the 81st annual Venice International Film Festival, to be held on the Lido di Venezia over an eleven day period, commencing on August 28th, and drawing to a conclusion on September 7th.

Venice is the star-studded film festival.

The lineup for the 81st edition of the festival includes new films starring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jude Law, all of whom will be present for the world début of their new films.

The 81st edition kicks off August 28th with the world première of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. All of the main cast, including Michael Keaton, are expected to grace the red carpet.

Filmmaker Todd Phillips is returning to Venice with a sequel. Joker: Folie à Deux, the highly anticipated follow-up to the 2019 blockbuster comic book film that won the Golden Lion (Best Film) in Venice,  a multiple Oscar award winner, starring Oscar-winning Best Actor Joaquin Phoenix as the mentally ill Arthur Fleck, and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn.


The erotic thriller Babygirl, starring Kidman and Harris Dickinson, from filmmaker Halina Reijn

Among the films playing alongside Joker 2 in competition are Pablo Larraín’s Maria Callas film Maria, starring Jolie; Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here; the erotic thriller Babygirl, starring Kidman and Harris Dickinson, from filmmaker Halina Reijn; Luca Guadagnino’s William S. Burrough’s adaptation Queer, with Craig and Jason Schwartzman; and Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, The Room Next Door, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

Seven episodes of Alfonso Cuarón’s psychological thriller series Disclaimer will also première at the festival, which will also screen at the Toronto Film Festival once the Venice Film Festival concludes. The AppleTV+ series is based on a novel about a documentary journalist and a secret she’s been keeping. It stars Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline and will début on the streamer on October 11th.

Venice is a significant launching ground for awards hopefuls and the first major stop of a busy fall film festival season, alongside the Toronto, Telluride and the New York Film Festivals.

In respect of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF will run from September 5th through 15th

New films from such internationally renowned auteurs as America’s Steven Soderbergh, South Korea’s Hong Sangsoo, Japan’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Iran’s Mohammad Rasoulof and a number of acclaimed Canadian directors will screen at the 49th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Highlights include Soderbergh’s new thriller Presence, starring Lucy Liu and Julia Fox, which premièred at the Sundance Film Festival at the beginning of the year; the drama The Friend, an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s acclaimed novel, starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts; By the Stream, the latest microbudget film from minimalist master Sangsoo; the hotly anticipated psychological thriller Cloud, from Kurosawa, best-known for his landmark 1997 horror film Cure.

Also on tap at TIFF: the documentary Will & Harper, featuring Will Ferrell; the papal thriller Conclave, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci; the concert doc Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band; the Lego-animated biopic Piece by Piece, tracing the life and career of Pharrell Williams; the post-apocalyptic musical The End, starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon; and Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which won over audiences at Cannes this past spring days after its director escaped impending imprisonment by the Iranian regime.

Meanwhile, the prestigious and heavily juried 62nd annual New York Film Festival kicks off on Friday, September 27th and runs through Monday, October 14th.


British director Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste

This year’s festival lineup includes new works from returning NYFF directors, such as David Cronenberg with The Shrouds, Alain Guiraudie with Misericordia, Mike Leigh with Hard Truths and Paul Schrader with Oh, Canada. Several directors will make their festival début, including Brady Corbet with The Brutalist, RaMell Ross with Nickel Boys and Kapadia with All We Imagine as Light.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” said Dennis Lim, New York Film Festival’s artistic director. “The most notable thing about the films in the main slate is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality. They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in, and reimagine the world.”

Many of the films listed in today’s VanRamblings column will also screen at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival — which I will begin writing about on August 30th, amidst my coverage of the upcoming provincial election — set to get underway Thursday, September 26 and run through Sunday, October 6th.

Grifters, The Mirror World, The Far Right & Late Stage Conspiracy Capitalism

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UBC professor Naomi Klein: revered academic, author, social activist and filmmaker in a wide-ranging conversation, talks with PoliticsJoe’s Oli Dugmore about her 2023 book Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World, diving into the industry of conspiracy theory & right-wing propaganda in the digital age.

In the video above, University of British Columbia Associate Professor Naomi Klein — whose work within the university’s Department of Geography focuses on the intersection of crisis and political transformation, and the large-scale shocks which follow — sits down with Oli Dugmore, PoliticsJoe’s Head of Politics and News for a wide-ranging, insightful and subtly exploratory conversation on “truth” in politics.


In large measure, moreso than in Klein’s well-received previous books —  1990’s No Logo, 2007’s The Shock Doctrine, and 2017’s This Changes Everything, to name just three — Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World offers more of a first-person memoir,  the book an in-depth critique and analysis of late-stage capitalism.

Down the Rabbit Hole Equation, How The Right Has Gained a Foothold Among So Many of Our Friends

Narcissism [grandiosity] x social media addiction + mid-life crisis ÷ public shaming = right wing meltdown.

Don’t be put off by the high falutin’ words above. Naomi Klein is a wonderfully engaging and entirely human scale —  and dare we say, vulnerable — interview subject, whose life is not too dissimilar to yours or mine, believe it or not. Ms. Klein puts on no airs as she helps us understand where we stand as a society in the early part of the 21st century, what bedevils us, the lies which have taken in too many among us, and the threat of the far right to our increasingly fragile democracy.

For VanRamblings, the most distressing aspect of the first half of the interview above arises from the discussion Mr. Dugmore and Ms. Klein have on the attacks, the unrelenting casual cruelty to which Ms. Klein is subject — and has been subject for a very long time — from those on the right, as well as the left, as if offering an opinion, and verifiable truths, somehow translates into committing a crime, leaving Ms. Klein open to death threats and other challenges to her personal safety.

Call us naïve, but VanRamblings has never understood the motivation of those who choose cruelty over kindness as a way of bringing themselves to the world, who choose to attack over finding common cause, and acknowledging our common humanity, and our innate oneness. We find the cruelty to which Ms. Klein is subject to be disturbing, abhorrent and utterly unbecoming in a civil society.

As Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle writes “Doppelganger swirls through the bewildering ideas of the ultra-right that often appear as a distorted mirror of left struggle and strategy,” as Klein’s book sets about to distill the political economies of corruption, crisis in our time, and necessary remediation.

Why Doppelganger? You’ll have to listen to the interview, or buy the book for the answer to that pungent, provocative, easily answered and heartrending question.

2024 Best Oscar Short Documentary Nominee |
The Last Repair Shop

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Porché Brinker plays violin in The Last Repair Shop, which tells the story of technicians who repair public school musical instruments in Los Angeles free of charge, and the kids who play them.

Only one documentary short nominee this year has the full balance of human interest, social relevance and aesthetic appeal that tends to make a winner.

It’s the Oscar-nominated The Last Repair Shop, directed by Halifax filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, who won two years ago for The Queen of Basketball, a New York Times Opinion production, and the composer Kris Bowers, who was nominated with Proudfoot for A Concerto Is a Conversation, another Times Opinion documentary.

This time, both have made their documentary with The Los Angeles Times.

“In a warehouse in the heart of Los Angeles, a dwindling handful of devoted craftspeople maintain more than 80,000 student musical instruments, the largest remaining workshop in America of its kind. In the film, you’ll meet four unforgettable characters whose broken-and-repaired lives have been dedicated to bringing so much more than music to schoolchildren in Los Angeles.”

The Last Repair Shop is a great film, a moving, elegiac and engaging must-watch if you’re a family, a teacher or are dedicated to public education.

The entirety of the film is available on YouTube, or on Disney+. If you have a Smart TV, you’ll absolutely want to watch the film on the bigger screen.


Steve Bagmanyan is the supervisor of the L.A. Unified School District’s Musical Instrument Repair Shop

In The Last Repair Shop, the repair shop of the title fixes instruments for the city’s school district, the film relating the story of the L.A. Unified School District’s Musical Instrument Repair Shop — the last public school district in the U.S. to service musical instruments free of charge — where 11 technicians service about 6,000 instruments each year for more than 1,300 schools across the city.

Steve Bagmanyan, supervisor of the repair shop: “Music can do wonderful things. Music can change lives. Music can take you off the streets. Music can fill you up with joy, with happiness.”

The opening text says the service has been offered to students for decades.

The Last Repair Shop presents the recollections of four specialists (in strings, brass, woodwinds and piano), who share their experiences of immigration, of coming to terms with being gay and even of opening for Elvis in a bluegrass band, a long-term payoff of buying a $20 fiddle at a swap meet.


Porché Brinker in Ben Proudfoot’s Oscar-nominated documentary short film, The Last Repair Shop.

Schoolchildren further testify to how music affects their lives. The contrast gives The Last Repair Shop a gentle inter-generational poignance, as it makes an uninflected case for the importance of financing public school music education.

It’s not just the students whose lives have been changed by music.

The people who repair the instruments all have their own stories to tell — whether it’s about travelling the country with a $20 fiddle from a flea market, leaving home to chase the American dream, growing up gay in the ’70s, or even surviving ethnic cleansing.

And at the centre of each story is music, and a desire to repair — and to heal.

“We all have broken relationships, broken promises. The world is, in many ways, broken. And I think what these people stand for is an optimism that sometimes you can make things whole again with enough effort and care and patience,” Ben Proudfoot says.

“You can’t fix everything that’s broken. But sometimes you can. And for that one time out of 10 where you can, it’s worth doing. And I think there’s not too many lessons better than that.”

The Last Repair Shop is a love letter to the role of music in public education, a testament to seeing how broken something may be — and fixing it anyway.

And it’s a tribute to those who toil away, largely without recognition, in service of the important task of helping the next generation realize their dreams.

Sunday Music | Azure Ray | 2001 | Dream Pop Artists

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Dream pop duo Azure Ray — composed of Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor — employ graceful harmonies, patient folksy song structures, and touches of electronic production to create otherworldly songs that balance tranquility and intensity.

The pair met at the age of 15 while attending the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Together, they fronted a band called Little Red Rocket, which released two CDs, Who Did You Pay (1997) and It’s in the Sound (2000), with the band breaking up shortly after the release of the latter album.

Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor decided to head out to Athens, Georgia, striking out to find a career, forming Azure Ray soon after arrival in their new home.

“My boyfriend had just died and we had written all of these songs that were helping us cope with everything. We had a night where all of our friends and family got together. We played those songs, which later would turn into the songs on our first Azure Ray record, which we released shortly thereafter,” says Taylor.

Their self-titled début album is a quiet, gentle set of lovely and soul-searching songs that incorporate elements of folk, pop, and light electronica.

Following the unexpected death of Taylor’s boyfriend, the two musicians used songwriting as a method of coping with their grief. The intensity of that loss informed the mournful tone of the group’s earliest work in 2001, and would carry through in their sound to some degree from that point on.

The song Sleep was later featured in the 2006 Academy Award-nominated movie The Devil Wears Prada, featuring Anne Hathaway. In February 2015, Taylor Swift included Sleep on a six-song “breakup playlist” made for a fan via her official Tumblr account.

Camilo Arturo Leslie in Pitchfork had this to say about the début album …

Their album cover is simple: just an old, sepia-toned photograph of a little girl. She looks like my grandmother as a child. Nostalgia and melancholy rub off the liner notes and stain your fingertips. The little girl clutches her palms to her ears and wears an inscrutable expression that vacillates from pouty to fearful to verge-of-tears, depending on what mental angle you hold it at.

Azure Ray’s indie music aesthetic is built on pretty, easy-on-the-tympanum pop acoustic guitar strumming. No fuzz, no indigestible chords, just polished production and evocative arrangements. Lap steel guitar, cello, violin, church bells, piano, brass, and tape loops make appearances on these 11 tracks.

The draw of their music is, of course, the duo’s vocals, Azure Ray’s gentle trills offering a haunting balance between the ethereal and corporeal, as well as an understated,  yet distinct feminine strength, not unlike the early music of Linda Ronstadt.

Indie label-ghetto obscurity has kept Azure Ray from attaining massive popularity.

But an indie-ghetto habitué such as yourself shouldn’t have any trouble digging up a copy of Azure Ray’s début CD, or maybe a vinyl copy.

Red Cat Records on Main Street, or Zulu Records on West 4th Avenue, if they don’t have it in stock, could certainly order it for you.

Beautiful, expertly crafted pop songs keep a room in your heart’s hotel (under an assumed name, naturally).

You could also listen to Azure Ray on Spotify, or Apple or Amazon Music, or purchase their music from either of the two latter providers of digital music.