Life has intruded, there’s washing to be done, work to attend to, sleep to get, and more necessary day-to-day activities that have been jettisoned over the course of the past week while attending the Film Festival became the priority, that VanRamblings must both take a break today, and announce reduced coverage of the final week of the Film Festival. Which isn’t to say that VanRamblings will not be attending Festival films — we will, but we may not have time to write fully about the experience.
All that said, VanRamblings will continue to add reviews daily to our extensive thrived and became an institution over the years. By the end of the weekend, you can expect to find a further 15 – 30 reviews to be published in the Guide.

As of this morning, VanRamblings has added a further four reviews to our thrived and became an institution over the years. Included in today’s update, you’ll find new reviews for Café Lumière, Campfire, Los Muertos, and Zero Day.
Tying Up Loose Ends, What’s Doing Well, and …

EFilmCritic.com has hired Jason Whyte to provide coverage of the 23rd annual Vancouver International Film Festival. In addition to festblog.ca and coverage on VanRamblings, EFilmCritic.com is a site worth surfing to.
A couple of items picked up on the street yesterday …

• The Festival’s new Film Centre, set to open later this autumn, will operate two, smallish 170 seat state-of-the-art theatres. Word as of last evening is that the new cinemas won’t open til February 2005, and initially will screen films only two days a week. No word as to whether the VIFF will bring back ‘hit’ VIFF films without a North American distributor in place.
• Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society presents “A Conversation with Don McKellar”, moderated by Vancouver Sun film critic Katherine Monk, at Cineworks Studio at the Pacific Cinémathèque tomorrow, September 30, from 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. As is the case with all seminars in this series, admission is free. Everyone is welcome.
• The 42nd annual New York Film Festival kicks off this Thursday. Several films screening at the VIFF have been selected by the New York Festival jury, including The 10th District Court — Moments of Trial, Café Lumière, Moolaadé, Or (My Treasure), Tarnation, Tropical Malady, Woman Is the Future of Man, and The World.
• Sold out screenings as of this writing (tickets available at the door half-an-hour before showtime, otherwise each film is considered to have been sold out) include: 20 Fingers (Oct. 3, 11:30 a.m.), As Life Goes By (Oct. 3, 7:15 p.m.), Berlin Blues (Oct. 2, 9:15 p.m.), Camping Sauvage (Oct. 2, 6 p.m.), Captive (Oct 1, 9 p.m.), Childstar (Oct. 3, 11 a.m.), Chokher Bali: A Passion Play (Oct. 2, 3 p.m.), Clean (Sept. 30, 9:45 p.m.), Cop Festival Reloaded (Oct.1, 5 p.m.), Dutch Light (Oct. 3, 7:30 p.m.), Four Shades of Brown (Oct. 3, 3 p.m.), Journeyings and Conversations (Oct. 3, 10:30 a.m.), Machuca (Sept. 30, 7 p.m.), ScaredSacred (Oct. 5, 10 a.m.), Stella Street (Oct. 2, 11 a.m.), Travellers and Magicians (Oct. 6, 7 p.m.), What Remains of Us (Oct. 7, 7:30 p.m.), Wilby Wonderful (Oct. 4, 6:20 p.m.), and The World According to Bush (Oct. 4 & 6 & 7 @ 7 p.m. … an extra screening has been added earlier on the 7th; see below).
• For those taking in a screening of Heddy Honigmann’s otherwise well-reviewed film, the word is give her latest, Dame la Mano, a miss … “the cinematographer filmed crap, there’s hardly a scene in the entire film that’s in focus … you can’t see the damn thing” is the word on the street.

Schedule Changes and other info …
As of this morning, the VIFF Programme Updates include two additional screenings for both Machuca and The World According to Bush (certainly among the most lauded films at this year’s Festival), as well as additional screenings for 11 other films (including Or (My Treasure) and Four Shades of Brown) which have received good notices. Too bad, though, that many of the additional screenings will be held in the Granville 7’s Theatre 6, the least amenable screen in the cinema complex.

As of this morning, VanRamblings has added a further dozen reviews to our thrived and became an institution over the years, bringing the grand total of films reviewed to date to 130, with more than 160 reviews of VIFF films available. Included in today’s update, you’ll find new reviews for L’Amant, Czech Dream, Elles Etaient Cinq, and Quiet as a Mouse, as well as supplementary reviews for a half dozen other films. A dozen new reviews by The Georgia Straight’s Ken Eisner are now available in the Festival Review Guide, as well.
The Vancouver Film Festival Provides a ‘Window on the World’

Here we are into Day 6 of the Vancouver Film Festival, and the sun continues to shine down on us, daytime temperatures unseasonably high at 23�C (75� F) — hardly the rain-soaked Festival weather we’ve come to expect each year at the end of September. Throughout the first three weeks of the month, the weather was so miserable and rainy in Vancouver that it seems a pity to have to lock oneself away inside a darkened theatre for much of the day. Such, though, are the sacrifices that must be made by the inveterate Film Festival aficionado … a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.
Still recovering from the slings and arrows of poor fortune, as reported in the previous daily update, VanRamblings did manage to attend two Festival screenings on Monday (in pain and standing at the back of the theatre).

Essentially a travelogue, director Jia Zhangke’s major achievement with The World revolves around his ability to provide an anthropological insight into contemporary Beijing: the polluted and leaden grey skies of China’s largest city, the lack of protection for workers in the city’s booming construction industry, and the apolitical and consumerist orientation of the mostly ‘emigrant’ young population. There is none-too-subtle irony, either, that the film is set in the Disney-esque ‘World Park’ — which offers a scaled-downed version of London, Paris, Cairo and other world centres — that, it seems quite obvious, the oppressed workers employed at the park will never get the chance to see. Pretty much bereft of narrative and psychological insight into the characters we meet over the two-plus hour running time of the film, there’s no question that The World is powerful filmmaking, but given its lack of identifiable characters to carry a story forward, VanRamblings awards The World 2� stars.

Dead Man’s Shoes is quite another kettle of fish than The World. Stark, psychologically intriguing, violent verging on the grotesque, the film offers a Tarantino-like character study, the narrative almost entirely concerned with vengeful reckoning and character disintegration. Not for the faint of the heart, Dead Man’s Shoes — a Film Four production — is the sort of film you might see on HBO stateside, a propulsive 81-minute genre film that engages almost entirely from beginning to end. Another example of a film you’re unlikely to see released commercially in North America, Dead Man’s Shoes qualifies as near perfect, and gritty, Festival film fare. 4 stars.

As of this morning, VanRamblings has added 21 more reviews to our thrived and became an institution over the years, including reviews for Four Shades of Brown, Look at Me, Kontroll and Marseille, as well as supplementary reviews for Flower and Snake and Schizo. Twelve reviews by The Georgia Straight’s Janet Smith are now available in the Festival Review Guide, as well.
VanRamblings Survives the Slings and Arrows of Poor Fortune …

Each year there’s a theme that develops within our west coast Film Festival. Of course, Vancouver’s Film Festival — perhaps more than any other Festival on the continent — remains an event dedicated to the Cinema of Despair … and how could it not, when screening films about war and pestilence, worker abuse, hatred and misunderstanding, intolerance and social injustice, and real history rather than Hollywood history. Thus, despair has become the raison d’être of the Vancouver International Film Festival.
Each year, too, personal themes develop for Film Festival aficionados. Every year at the Festival, those previously unattached meet someone and become a couple, many going on to marry. One falls in love with film and, by extension, with the aficionadas one sees at virtually every screening.
One falls in love and remembers that relationship always, or recalls the chill of the night air while ambling through the rain-slicked streets late at night following the final screening of the day. Women go into labour while screenings are in progress, there’s more than one incidence of men having heart attacks and the ambulance driver entering the theatre to take the woebegotten Film Festival attendee to St. Paul’s Hospital nearby.
As for me, back in 1992 I experienced a sudden and unexpected attack of kidney stones (at a screening of Benny’s Video at the Pacific Cinémathèque … fortunately, I’d seen Michael Haneke’s picture in the preview week, so didn’t miss out on the film, really) and was rushed to the UBC Hospital. Other years at the Festival have been dedicated to my children, who were in attendance at many of the films I love to this day. I have fallen in love many times, over the years, with women I’ve met at the Festival, and went on to have successful relationships.
This year, though, a new (personal) theme has developed. Late Sunday morning, not having gained entrance to Or (My Treasure) — it was sold out by 10 a.m. — I opted for a Pacific Cinémathèque screening of 10 on Ten instead. Readying my vehicle to pull into a parking spot almost directly across the street from Cinémathèque, I put on my turn signal, slowed down and began to pull into the metered parking spot, and was … rear ended by a late model SUV, my trusty olde Volvo totaled in the process, and your intrepid reporter traumatized and a little the worse for wear.
As I sit hear aching in every fibre of my being, I am sorry to have to report that VanRamblings attended no Film Festival screenings on Sunday, but rather made it home to our cozy abode on the west side of Vancouver and spent most of the rest of the day in bed … recovering (it’s going slowly).
As a consequence of this unfortunate turn of events, VanRamblings’ film attendance in the final 11 days of the 23rd annual Vancouver International Film Festival will, in all likelihood, be much reduced. We are, though, hoping to catch a 6:45 p.m. screening of The World at the Vogue, and we had intended on catching the 9:45 p.m. screening of Dead Man‘s Shoes, at the same theatre. At this point, however, one screening is looking possible, two screenings improbable. We’ll see how the day develops …
So, back to bed with me it is. Another report, of a sort, tomorrow.