Category Archives: VanRamblings

VIFF 2019 | Late Summer Early Autumn Film Festival Season

August 23, 2019A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblings, VIFF 2019Raymond Tomlin

Although many believe that the Oscar season begins in mid-May at the Cannes Film Festival, in fact the Oscar race officially kicks off at the end of August with the Telluride (Aug. 30 – Sept. 2), Venice (Aug. 28 – Sept. 7), Toronto (Sept. 5 – 15) and, at the end of September, both the New York Film Festival (Sept. 27 – Oct. 13) and our very own homegrown film festival (VIFF 2019, Sept. 26 – Oct. 11), where most of the upcoming Oscar contenders will make their auspicious and much-anticipated débuts.

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes this year, Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables — débuting at VIFF 2019 as part of the Spotlight on France series — emerged as one of Jeff Wells’ (Hollywood Elsewhere) favourite films at Cannes this year, a film he describes as “explosive, urgent, furious, riveting, breathless and impactful,” and about which VIFF’s festival guide says …

Set in the same suburban Paris neighbourhood, Montfermeil, used by Victor Hugo as the location for the Thénardiers’ Inn in his Les Misérables, débuting director Ladj Ly’s gripping, incendiary police-thriller gives us a young cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who joins an Anti-Crime Squad team led by loose cannon Chris (co-writer Alexis Manenti, superb) and is soon immersed in a world of poverty and internecine power struggles. When images of police brutality start circulating, the shit hits the fan…

The full VIFF 2019 festival guide will be online two weeks from today, on Friday, September 6th, on the same day the glossy cover programme will be available at libraries and various other outlets across Metro Vancouver.
With the summer silly season of dreaded movie sequels having drawn to a close, with box office down 19% this summer over last, the failed popcorn blockbusters are about to give way to the more serious fare all cinephiles cherish, all of which are ready to elbow their way into the Oscar derby.
At the various film festivals that will unspool future Oscar award winners over the course of the next month and a half, new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Noah Baumbach, Terrence Malick, Edward Norton, and more will launch into the awards season or fizzle out.
In respect of VIFF 2019, as more information about the 38th annual Vancouver International Film Festival becomes available, we’ll publish our idiosyncratic take and insight into the information with which we’re provided. In the meantime, take a look below for films that will début at one or more of the above-mentioned film festivals, including our own illustrious Vancouver International Film Festival …

Writer-director-producer Edward Norton has transplanted the main character of Jonathan Lethem’s best-selling novel Motherless Brooklyn from modern Brooklyn into an entirely new, richly woven neo-noir narrative: a multilayered conspiracy that expands to encompass the city’s ever-growing racial divide, set in 1950s New York.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

On the cusp of the 19th century, young painter Marianne travels to a rugged, rocky island off the coast of Brittany to create a wedding portrait of the wealthy yet free-spirited Héloise. An emotional and erotic bond develops between the women in Céline Sciamma’s Cannes-awarded subversion of the story of an artist and “his” muse.

In this richly burnished, occasionally harrowing rendering of the persistent scars of war, two women, Iya and Masha (astonishing newcomers Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina), attempt to readjust to a haunted post-WWII Leningrad.

Noah Baumbach’s new film is about the rapid tangling and gradual untangling of impetuosity, resentment, and abiding love between a married couple — played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson — negotiating their divorce and the custody of their son. It’s as harrowing as it is hilarious as it is deeply moving.

Pedro Almodóvar taps into new reservoirs of introspection and emotional warmth with this miraculous, internalized portrayal of Salvador Mallo, a director not too subtly modeled on Almodóvar himself and played by Antonio Banderas, who deservedly won Best Actor at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

A searing exploration of the consequences of upholding one’s convictions in a time of terrifying upheaval, this latest work from Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) mines the themes of spirituality and engagement with the natural world that have permeated so much of the American auteur’s late-period renaissance. Set in Austria during the rise of the Third Reich, A Hidden Life movingly relays a little-known true story of quiet heroism.

Music Sundays | Angus and Julia Stone | Sibling Folk

June 2, 2019A & E, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Julia Natasha Stone was born on the 13th of April 1984 in Sydney Australia.
Julia’s parents, Kim and John Stone, were both well-regarded Australian folk musicians who played locally. Two years later, on April 27th 1986, her brother Angus was born. At family gatherings, it was not uncommon to see the two siblings perform — all was well until, in 2000, their parents split.
After finishing secondary school and while on a holiday with her brother in South America, Julia was impressed by her brother’s musical talent, “Angus was writing amazing songs … he had shown me how to play guitar when we were traveling in Bolivia, and those songs had gotten me through that year (Julia had, earlier that year separated from her boyfriend, from all reports a turbulent relationship, which left Julia emotionally devastated)”.
Within a year, in 2004, Julia began writing her own songs.
By 2005, and back in Sydney, Angus and Julia began to play gigs at open mic nights, with Angus performing backing vocals for Julia, as in time Julia did for Angus, on the songs he wrote. Finally, in 2006, the two formed a duo, Angus and Julia Stone. In March of that year the pair recorded their début extended play, Chocolates and Cigarettes, a remarkably chill amalgam of songs written and recorded live at home.
The EP, released in August, went on to win the ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) 2006 Best Album award, with Angus and Julia also taking home the Best New Group prize. The rest, as they say, is history.

Chocolates & Cigarettes directed by Angus and Julia Stone — from their 2006 début EP.

Angus and Julia Stone’s second album, Down the Way (March 2010), débuted at number one on the ARIA Albums Chart and was certified 3x platinum in 2011, It was the highest-selling album by an Australian artist for 2010. At the 2010 ARIA Music Awards the duo won ARIA Album of the Year for Down the Way and ARIA Single of the Year for Big Jet Plane, attaining the number-one position in the Triple J Hottest 100 in 2011, as voted on by radio station listeners across Australia.

Angus and Julia Stone last played in Vancouver on November 28th 2017, to a sold-out audience of 1280 fans at The Vogue.

Stories of a Life | 1978 – 1982 | Chief Cook and Bottlewasher

June 1, 2019fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Thought for the Day, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

1978. Jude, at age 3½, and Megan at 2 years of age. At the kitchen table for breakfast.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was extolling the virtues of my Instant Pot to a friend, in a lull in the conversation, she turned to me and said, “You like to cook, don’t you?”
The short answer: I derive pleasure from both cooking and baking.
Here’s the story behind my love for the culinary powers of the kitchen.

1616 Semlin Drive, at E. 1st Ave. in Vancouver. One of the homes I lived in growing up.

From my earliest days, I fended for myself. My mother worked three jobs, and my father worked the afternoon shift at the Post Office. When I arrived home, although my father often left a stew bubbling away in the slow cooker, from age seven on, for the most part if I wanted to eat, I’d have to make breakfast, lunch and dinner for myself and for my sister.
So, being somewhat industrious, I learned to cook — well, make sandwiches and, for dessert, Jello, at least for the first few years. I loved turkey growing up (all that triptiphan), so with the help of my mother, I learned to make her delicious turkey, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes and vegetables. For the most part, though, my cooking skills were rudimentary — but I didn’t starve, and more often than not there was food in my belly.
When in 1970 Cathy and I moved in together, marrying soon after, I was responsible for most of the cooking. Cathy’s mom sent her out $1000 a month (she didn’t know we were living together), visiting every three months, taking us to the local Woodward’s grocery floor, where she dropped in excess of $300 at each visit. With Cathy’s mother money, we ate a fairly staple diet of generously thick T-bone steaks and baked potatoes.

Simon Fraser University’s Louis Riel House, student family 1 + 2 bedroom residence.

Soon after moving into the Louis Riel Student Residence at Simon Fraser University in 1971, Cathy joined a women’s group, who met every Wednesday evening. Among the decisions that were taken by the women’s group was this: men shall participate in all household chores, and share in all food preparation. As we often ate together with other of the students in the residence, my specialty became salads — all different kinds of healthy, nutritious salads, chock full of vegetables, nuts, sunflower seeds, and more.
At this point, Cathy still hated to cook — there was immense pressure placed on Cathy by her peers to develop culinary skills, but she refused. All that changed in the summer of 1973, which is a story for another day.

2182 East 2nd Avenue, in the Grandview Woodland neighbourhood of Vancouver.

When Cathy and I separated in 1978 — Jude and I lived in the home above, before Jude, Megan and I moved to Simon Fraser University and Louis Riel House, when I began work on my Masters degree — the thought occurred to me one morning when making breakfast that I was now the lone parent, and the sole person responsible for ensuring the children ate nutritious foods at each meal in order that they might grow up into healthy adults. I took on the task of learning the art of cooking (and baking), in earnest.
There was, however, a quid pro quo involved.
After returning from a day of larnin’ and T.A.’ing at SFU, after picking up the children at daycare at 4:30pm, and walking the relatively short distance to our two-bedroom apartment at Louis Riel House, while the children played with their friends on the lawn in front of our apartment, I prepared dinner, calling them in about 45 minutes after dinner preparation had begun. The kids were famished, and so was I.
Here’s where the quid pro quo came in: at the end of each meal, each of the children had to turn and say to me some version of, “Daddy that was a good dinner. It was mmmm, delicious. Thank you for making dinner for all of us, and all the work you put in to feeding us healthy and nutritious breakfasts, lunches and dinners, and all those wonderful desserts we love!”
I needed the incentive provided to me by both children, so their gratitude — which, in time, they came to acknowledge as their own — and the kids felt good about encouraging me, as I encouraged them in all of their endeavours. We were a happy family & all was well with the world for us.
Now, I was an adventuresome cook, and not everything I made turned out to the liking of each one of us.
Being a dedicated democrat, Jude, Megan and I made a deal with one another in respect of dinner. Both children had to eat at least two bites of each food item I prepared: after all the work I put into preparing a dish, the least they could do was try out the dish to see whether they might like it. Most of the time they did, but sometimes not.
One night, I made cream of escargot soup. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. But at the end of the soup entrée, I turned to the children and asked them what they thought, to which they replied almost in unison, “It was all right, tasty enough I suppose, but I’m not sure if I’d ever want to have it again.” I agreed with them. We never ate cream of escargot soup ever again.
Each of us were allowed to have three foods on a list of our creation, foods we did not have to eat, no matter what. Megan had three foods, Jude had three foods, and I had three foods — those foods changed over a period of time. In order to add a food to our individual “nah, I don’t want to eat that food” list, some food on each of our lists had to come off. Took some thought on the part of the children as to whether they wanted to remove a food. Megan, for a great long while didn’t like avocados — but one day, while placing a new food she didn’t like onto her “don’t eat” list, she took out avocados, eventually coming to love avocados, as she does to this day.
Watching me prepare meals all the time he was growing up caused Jude to want to become a chef — he worked in the food industry throughout his late teens and twenties, before getting into teaching, which paid better, and was overall less stressful, with “more honourable people”, he’d say to me.
In her teens, Megan became a vegan — there’s a story there, too, which I’ll leave for another day — and, for the most part, took on the preparation of her own meals, as did Jude over a period of time. After the summer of 1973, Cathy became a great cook — there’s not much I miss about that tumultuous marriage, but I sure miss Cathy’s avant-garde cooking, her culinary craftsmanship, spicing & phenomenally delicious cooking. Ah well.

Disinhibition, Coarseness & Social Cantagion In The Age of Trump

May 27, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Decision Canada 2019, News, Politics, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Two centuries ago, a wave of suicides swept across Europe as if the very act of suicide was somehow infectious.
Shortly before their untimely deaths, many of the suicide victims had come into contact with Johann von Goethe’s tragic tale The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the hero, Werther, himself commits suicide. In an attempt to stem what was seen as a rising tide of imitative suicides, anxious authorities banned the book in several regions across Europe.
During the two hundred years that have followed the publication and subsequent censorship of Goethe’s novel, social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious.
Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur. This is social contagion theory; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through and leap between people like outbreaks of measles or chicken pox rather than through a process of rational choice.
The online disinhibition effect is a term used to describe the lowering of psychological restraints, a seeming inability to regulate our behaviors in an online social environment leading to reduced behavioural inhibitions online, and a negating of normative behavioural boundaries while in cyberspace, resulting in destructive interpersonal behaviors while using social media.
Welcome to the Age of Trump, the age of unreason and disinformation, of Russian bots and the spreading of racial hatred, the targeting of minority populations as “the other”, the rise of anti-Semitism, rampant cynicism, misplaced anger, isolation and the breakdown of contemporary society.

Germany to fight anti-Semitism. Children learn about Holocaust at Berlin Jewish school.

On Saturday, May 25th, Felix Klein, the German government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, told the Funke media group …

“I cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere in Germany. Jews should think twice before wearing the traditional kippah skullcap in public arising from a recent and sustained rise in attacks against Jews.

Anti-Semitism has always existed in Germany, but in this new era of social dysfunction, brought on in some measure by the odious conduct of the U.S. President, anti-Semitism is now showing its ugly face more openly.

There is no question that the rise in social disinhibition and coarseness has played a role in the worsening situation we’re currently experiencing in Europe. The internet and social media have also strongly contributed to this — and also to the continuous attacks on our culture of remembrance.

The word Jew as an insult was not common in my time when I went to school. Now, in the early part of the 21st century, it is and it’s even an insult at schools where there are no Jews, where there are no Jewish students. So that is a growing concern and of course we have to develop strategies to counter that, in Germany and across Europe.”

Toxic disinhibition, an empathy deficit, the absence of restraint — and online, anonymity, invisibility and intermittent, unfledged asynchronous communication are far from benign in their impacts, not only on social discourse, but at the ballot box and in each and every one of our lives, where increasingly otherwise good people live without conscience, informed social awareness, and their role in the social collective we call Canada.

The 2016 American election was one of the ugliest elections in the history of the United States. Hillary Clinton was continually subject to unwarranted attacks, and daily demonized online. Not a day went by in the lead up to the November 8, 2016 U.S. election when I didn’t find myself outraged at the “sharing” — by a broad range of people on the left with whom I had worked over many years — of Russian bot disinformation, and misogynist commentary about the “war-mongering” U.S. Senator & Secretary of State.
Speaking at a Liberal fundraiser in Toronto last October, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told those who were gathered at the Danforth Music Hall the upcoming federal election would be the ugliest election in Canadian history.

“We are now looking at perhaps what will be the most divisive and negative and nasty political campaign in Canada’s history,” Trudeau said. “I can tell you, we will do the same thing we did in 2015: No personal attacks, strong differentiation on issues of policy. I will not engage in personal attacks and none of our team will either.

A positive, compelling message that brings people together, that refuses the politics of personal attacks, that refuses the politics of division of scare tactics — whether it’s snitch lines or hijab attacks — that kind of approach that Stephen Harper tried does not work.

Once you’ve gone and divided and angered people in order to get elected it becomes very difficult afterward to pull them together in a way that actually allows us to solve the challenges that we need to solve. To run on division and fear and easy populism makes it harder to do the good things that must be the central purpose of why we run for office.”

Make no mistake, with $65 million in corporate funds already in the kitty for the federal Conservative party to wage their 2019 electoral campaign, with a lesser $41 million available to the Trudeau Liberals, and a paltry $5 million and $3 million, respectively, for Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party of Canada and Elizabeth May’s Green Party of Canada, Andrew Scheer’s far right-of-centre social Conservative party is ready to wage that nasty, ugly campaign Justin Trudeau has talked about to crowds across Canada who have gathered to hear our Prime Minister.

Fight to Defeat Coarseness, Social Contagion, Disinhibition & Isolation
As Canadians, we can do our part by keeping our online discourse respectful, sticking to the facts, not sharing or retweeting the disinformation that will surely be provided by the Russian bots invading our social media, by joining the Greens, the New Democrats or the federal Liberal party, to donate time and money, to work on the campaigns of the socially progressive candidates we support, to staff the candidates’ offices, to go door knocking, gather with others in burmashaves in neighbourhoods, across our city and in Metro Vancouver — and make a difference, fight for inclusion & have a positive impact on the outcome of the election, in order that diversity, climate action, transit, infrastructure, affordable housing, continued subsidy funding of housing co-ops, preservation of our coasts, and preservation of the Canada Child Benefit introduced by the Trudeau government in 2016 that has served to reduce child poverty in Canada by 40%, or 300,000 children, since its introduction only three short years ago, will remain atop the political agenda in Canadian federal governance.