Newly-elected leader of the federal NPD speaks to the party’s enthusiastic Vancouver supporters, in a speech given at The Imperial on Main, Wednesday night, November 1st

Young, energetic, articulate and clearly very bright, self-assured yet humble, charismatic, caring, Canada’s first non-white federal leader, representing generational change, fearless, embraced by NDP party activists across the land, hopeful, thoughtful and decidedly not halting in his speech, necessarily possessed of a clear sense of social-justice goals based on egalitarian principles, a dapper young politician who currently represents an urban, ethnically mixed riding in the Ontario legislature and — maybe, just maybe — Canada’s next Prime Minister, Jagmeet (pronounced Jugmeet) Singh made his way to Vancouver on Wednesday evening, introduced by NDP stalwart Constance Barnes, for a meet-and-greet at The Imperial on Main with a cross-section of party supporters.
Celebration. Good cheer. Singh = much-need change for the better, for all.
More Celebration

My friends, neighbours and NDP compatriots Bill Tieleman and Shirley Ross celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary this week, for which event VanRamblings wishes them a heartfelt congratulations on lives well-lived, and loved, and the respect, admiration and love of your many friends.

Shirley Ross and Bill Tieleman celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary at Bishops

More Cause for Celebration (on a somewhat less salutary note)

What did we do before the advent of streaming video on Netflix? Were we actually truly living life without the ready access Netflix affords to 5600 movies of quality and 3500 TV shows, all for as little as $10 a month?

Dee Rees’ Sundance winner, starring Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell & Carey Mulligan

One of the best reviewed films of the year, a smash hit at the Sundance Film Festival way back in January, and fortuitous for ye, me and thee, as it is set for a day-and-date release — which is to say, Mudbound will be available both at your local multiplex and on Netflix — on Friday, Nov. 17th.
Otherwise, there’s Godless — a 7-episode oater from Oscar winning director Steven Soderbergh, set in 1880s La Belle, New Mexico, a town mysteriously made up entirely of women. Stars Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, Jeff Daniels, Jack O’Connell, Scott McNairy and a cast of hundreds.
Or, how about the fifth and final season of the peerlessly involving Longmire television series. Or, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu’s 2015 multiple Oscar winner. Or, Logan — another in the Marvel Wolverine series, which sees Hugh Jackman reprising his signature role. Or Gold, starring a less than hirsute Matthew McConaughey, which proves to be a surprisingly involving watch.
Then there’s the début of Spike Lee’s update of 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It. Should you watch the New to Netflix in November video above, you’ll find much, much more on offer from Netflix in the month of November.

Final tip: if you haven’t watched Kornél Mundruczó’s 2014 Cannes’ Un Certain Regard award-winning masterpiece, White God (VanRamblings’ favourite film this decade), you oughta. The Los Angeles Times says …

This small, touching fable about a girl and her dog becomes an adrenaline-pumping thriller about animals against humans in Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó’s exhilarating radicalization allegory White God. By turns Dickensian, Marxist and dystopian, it’s a movie as deliriously unclassifiable as it is expertly focused in its desire to provoke and entertain.

The films opens with beautifully dreamlike shots of 13-year-old Lili bicycling down the empty streets of Budapest until scores of dogs careen around a corner, their bodies in full, magnificent motion. Are they following her? Or chasing her? By the time Mundruczó returns to that scene as something literal, it’s a powerful, pure-cinema reminder that the iconography of freedom and uprising needn’t only belong to humans.

And, yes, White God is on Netflix — you’ll want to add it to your list now.

Almost a year to the day since VanRamblings last published a column, this 14½ year-old website returns with daily posts.
Where VanRamblings will go in the times to come only those gifted with divine foresight might reasonably project; as for us, we’re not entirely sure what this restored publishing venture will bring, following a year responding to a diagnosis of terminal cancer — for all intents and purposes, we’re fine now, a miracle having been visited upon us, for reasons still unclear but salutary. Only time and words on a screen will tell the tale to be told.
Chances are that it’ll take some time for VanRamblings to find our voice.
For now, beginning tomorrow - Thursday, September 14th - VanRamblings will set about every second day through until the end of this year’s VIFF on Friday, October 13th to provide our near usual coverage of the upcoming and gloriously humane 36th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.
Every other day through until Saturday, October 14th, VanRamblings will provide our usual (and troubling to many, it seems) idiosyncratic take on the political scene, most specifically the upcoming Vancouver City Council and Vancouver School Board by-elections. Readers can reasonably expect liberal use of hyperbole, for which VanRamblings is justly (in)famous.

With a British Columbia provincial election looming fewer than nine months away — on Tuesday, May 9th, 2017 — the time has come for VanRamblings to arise phoenix like from the ashes of the 2016 Canadian federal election.
In the coming months, there will be much that will be written on this blog as to why any thinking, socially aware, informed and compassionate British Columbian must choose to vote for the New Democratic Party of British Columbia over Canada’s most right-wing, least responsive (except in the lead up to an election) Liberal-in-name-only provincial political party. That most important work will begin in November, in the weeks following the …

35th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, to which VanRamblings will dedicate almost all of its energies over the course of the next month, with the first of 30 VIFF columns to be published Monday, September 19th.
Following the conclusion of Vancouver’s annual film festival by the sea, chances are that VanRamblings will focus, mainly, on the upcoming U.S. election, offering opinion and reflection on what is to be wrought on Tuesday, November 8th south of the border, and the implications of the most important election in the United States in more than 50 years.
Although VanRamblings’ primary focus following the U.S. election will be British Columbia’s perhaps not quite so consequential provincial election, VanRamblings will also turn its attention to Vancouver municipal politics, focusing mainly on Park Board & School Board, as strong opinion abounds.
And, finally, in a departure from past VanRamblings practice, this blog will increasingly turn its attention to a personal journal, mordantly titled fixin’ to die rag, more as a service to VanRamblings’ two lovely children, Jude and Megan, so that they (and you) will come to better understand who it is that has composed posts on VanRamblings dating back to February 2004.
As has long proven to be the case, what you will find published on VanRamblings will please almost no one (opinion, fidelity and truth are hardly in vogue these days), least of all my children (and their mother) in respect of the fixin’ to die rag, most political figures of every stripe (as always, one can expect much consternation from the good-hearted folks involved in COPE), and those who reside on the political spectrum far from the territory where VanRamblings has long found its philosophical home.
Welcome back to VanRamblings — a raucous ride is all but guaranteed!