The annual Vancouver International Film Festival has wrapped for another year, and VanRamblings is verklempt that ‘it’s‘ gone until next year.
We spent the final day of the 2008 film festival catching up on screenings we missed …

The Wrecking Crew (Grade: A-): For a child of the 60s, a lover of the music of the era, and a former sixties disc jockey, VanRamblings was swept away with the nostalgic, and informational, value of The Wrecking Crew. All those licks, on all those songs, and it was ace guitarist Tommy Tedesco, bassist extraordinaire Carol Kaye, percussionist Hal Blaine, and approximately 20 others, who provided the beat to the soundtrack of our lives. The Wrecking Crew were the real musicians in the studio, not the actual band members. What a revelation! One of the must-sees at the Vancouver Film Festival.
Parenting (Grade: B): Five Canadian shorts of varying quality, there’s no doubt that Peg Campbell’s Your Mother Should Know was one of the programme highlights, an exploration of the mother-daughter dynamic. All and all, a powerful group of films (we were also moved by Marié-Josée Saint-Pierre’s Passages). A good way to end our Festival experience.
In the evening, Festival director, Alan Franey, announced the award winners at this year’s Fest. The audience favourite in the Cinema of Our Time? Philippe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t’aime).
Well, that’s a wrap for the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival. We’ll post some of our reflections on the Festival early in the coming week.
Congratulations for a job well done, to Alan and his programming crew, to the Media and all the other VIFF staff, to the incredibly wonderful volunteer staff, to the Board of Directors, and to all the filmmakers — many of whom travelled halfway across the globe to be here — for providing a window on our world to all of those who attended the 2008 Vancouver Film Festival.

General consensus on the last days of the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival is that the quality of films at this year’s Fest don’t measure up to the films that were available in 2007.
But, then again, very few Vancouver International Film Festivals ever have.
One of the striking aspects of this year’s Festival is the uniquely subjective nature of attendees’ response to films. For instance …
Audiences are divided on The Secret of the Grain, half feeling as VanRamblings does that ‘Secret‘ represents one of the strongest films available on the world stage at the 2008 edition of the Vancouver Film Festival, the other half of the madding crowd calling the film loud, boring and overlong. There was a similar response to VanRamblings’ Festival film favourite, The New Year Parade, where more than half the audience of 30 walked out of the film midway through, leaving only 14 audience members in attendance at the VanCity Theatre — all of whom raved about the film in an informal scrum after the screening. Who’s to know?
Thursday evening we found ourselves in a heated discussion (well, we were heated, anyway) about the merits, or lack thereof, of the German film, Cloud 9. VanRamblings viscerally hated this film, which many have dismissed, and called Old People Fucking. Bereft of insight and tedious in the extreme, the women we were discussing this film with (an erudite group) had much praise for the film. Gosh. There’s just no accounting for taste. Whether it’s VanRamblings taste, or the taste of the group of women with whom we were conversing, is up for discussion, it would seem.
When all is said and done, we still hate Cloud 9, but are we in the minority?
The same women came away from 3 Women — which we saw on Thursday morning, and loved — critical of the film, calling it a “failure”. We were swept away by the film, as were most in the audience (given the comments we heard while exiting the theatre); these particular three women with whom we were conversing were, decidedly, not. Sometimes, there just ain’t no …
Or, as retired Famous Players’ manager, Ted Beelby, averred upon leaving a screening of the Canadian film, Crime, “there’s 2 hours I’ll never get back.”
Still, there were at least a couple of buzz films we saw over the course of the past couple of days on which there was some positive consensus …

Let The Right One In (Grade: A-): A touching, pre-adolescent vampire love story, VanRamblings saw this gory horror delight with a secondary Vancouver school audience who’d been invited to the screening (it’s all about building a future audience for the Festival). No one can do atmospheric dark horror like Swedish filmmakers, and Lina Leandersson is simply exquisite as the lost soul of the film. We’re glad we saw this film.
Sita Sings The Blues (Grade: A-): Given that first time filmmaker Nina Paley has been unable to gain the rights to the songs sung in the film by jazz/blues singer extraordinaire, Annette Hanshaw, and that permission has been given to screen the film only at selected film festivals, either you caught Sita Sings The Blues here, or you were simply going to be out of luck. A crossover Bollywood / contemporary American tale, based on an ancient text, the Hindu epic poem, Ramayana, paired with modern-day vignettes of a San Francisco couple’s passage to India leading to the end of their marriage, Sita Sings The Blues is brilliant from beginning to end.
The power of the music and lyrics of the evocative 1929 jazz and blue soundtrack so heightens a character’s interior state, with the blues songs Sita sings — from “Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home?”, “Mean to Me (“You treated me coldly“),” to “Am I Blue?”, you’re just pulled in.
VanRamblings was very mezzo mezzo about Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal (Grade: B), about the personal and political betrayal of a family of Laotians (Nixon comes off very badly here), and were even more significantly disenchanted with Donkey in Lahore (which, for filmmaking expertise, we’d offer a Grade: B-; and on a personal basis we’d award a solid Grade:D-).
Apart from the craft of the filmmaking in Donkey in Lahore, we hated the film (for personal reasons, of course). We ask ourselves, would we want to marry off our daughter to an unemployed Australian hobbyist puppeteer with a borderline personality disorder? Nope. We think not.
And it was ever thus at the 2008 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Some films you love; some films you don’t. But rarely do you find Festival-goers in the very same group, agreeing on any one particular film.

As the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival draws, inexorably, towards its triumphant close, VanRamblings seems to have found a second wind, and looks forward to catching lots of Festival films Thursday & Friday.
The above said, as is the case with many Festival aficionados, we are feeling a bit weary after catching 4 or 5 films each day, over a period of 16 days.
Secretly, if truth be told, we’re sorta glad the Festival is drawing to a close.
But we feel conflicted. Yes, we’re tuckered after viewing 50+ hard-hitting foreign films. But, really, we don’t want this phantasmagoria of film to end.
Because we’ve got four screening to take in on Thursday — 3 Women, Sita Sings The Blues, Afterschool, and Donkey in Lahore — we’ll keep tonight’s posting mercifully brief. After all, only hours from now, VanRamblings will begin our last full day of the Festival. There’s films to see — we’ll be there.
Flame and Citron (Grade: A-): One of the must-see buzz films at this year’s Festival, Flame and Citron easily lives up to its pre-fest billing as gripping, entirely involving Danish film fare, as director Ole Christian Madsen explores the internecine power struggles in WWII’s Danish resistance movement, the subterfuge, and the duplicity. Wonderfully rendered. An important film, and when you get right down to it, an overall better made film than last year’s much-ballyhooed Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, The Counterfeiters.
Hunger (Grade: B+): As James Christopher writes in the London Times, “a stunning début feature.” A portrait of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands — one of the key figures in the IRA struggles of the 1980s — and set in H-Block of Maze Prison where republican inmates staged a ” dirty” protest against the British government’s refusal to recognize them as political prisoners, Hunger offers shocking film fare, where contemporary parallels might easily be drawn to U.S. involvement at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
There’s one scene in particular that stands out — an intellectual deconstruction of the moral rationale for continuing to offer resistance in the face of certain failure — between Sands (an amazing Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham, who is terrific).
Margaret Thatcher comes off miserably, almost a monster, in a series of voiceovers inserted throughout the film. Made primarily for a domestic audience, tyro director Steve McQueen’s Hunger is still mighty powerful film fare, emerging as another must-see at the 2008 Vancouver Film Festival.
There’s more to write, but not now. We’ll offer a wrap-up of 2008’s Fest, at some point over the weekend, and will post over the next two days, too.