Update: Great news! The situation written about in the VanRamblings blog post below has been resolved, as of 1:30 p.m. this Thursday afternoon.
Festival Director, Alan Franey, spoke to City and BC Hydro officials early this afternoon, and was successful in reaching an agreement that will see a halt to construction along Granville Street, outside the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas, until the end of the next week, Friday, October 10th, the final day of the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.

VanRamblings received the following e-mail, this morning, from Ellie O’Day, Media Director for the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The management of the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) is doing everything in its power to avert a serious disruption of our event by construction work just now beginning outside the Empire Granville 7 Cinemas, at 855 Granville Street.

The noise generated from this work could well mean the cancellation of many of the 200 screenings remaining at this venue. We received assurances from street engineers that consideration would be made of the fact that the Film Festival attracts 100,000 attendees to this block between September 25 and October 10.

That consideration appears to be inconvenient now.

We have received sympathetic counsel from everyone we’ve spoken to at City Hall and at B.C.Hydro, but nothing has so far averted this extremely serious blow to the Festival. Since no explanation has been forthcoming as to why this work absolutely needed to coincide with our brief event, it is time to warn our public. Hopefully a more public airing of our concern will encourage reasonable action to be taken in time.

We will immediately alert you as soon as a decision has been taken to cancel screenings in the 4 screens most badly affected by the jack hammering and street excavation: Theatres 3, 4, 5 & 6. Meanwhile, we apologize to the thousands of festival-goers who have already assembled each day in front of the theatre and found it difficult to make themselves understood against the noise of asphalt sawing.

The time has come for Festival-goers to get onboard, and contact City officials to hold off on Granville Street construction until after Thanksgiving.
Here’s what you can do …
E-mail your Vancouver City Councillors, by clicking here to send an e-mail to Mayor Sam Sullivan, and all Vancouver City Councillors.
Let them know just how you feel about the decision taken by BC Hydro, and the City’s Engineering Department, to commence road construction along Granville Street during our the Vancouver International Film Festival, and ask them to hold off on further construction until Festival’s end.
Write to Tom Timm, General Manager of Engineering Services, and Peter Judd. By clicking on their names, you’ll be taken directly to your e-mail programme. Compose a letter expressing your concern respecting the decision taken by the City to begin road construction along Granville Street during the 16-day running period of the Vancouver Film Festival.

VanRamblings will provide updates on this situation as they occur.

The prevailing opinion on Wednesday was that VanRamblings had rushed to judgment, respecting the quality of films screening at this year’s Festival. In a mid-afternoon tête-à-tête outside the Granville 7, following a screening of the utterly fabulous Wendy and Lucy, cinephile John Skibinski suggested to VanRamblings that, “For years, the stronger films have screened in the 2nd week. Although it’s true that nothing has blown me away thus far, there are a great many worthy films yet to screen in the nine days to come.”

Wendy and Lucy (Grade: A): Kelly Reichardt is the goddess of minimalist filmmaking. In Wendy and Lucy, there’s not one wasted word, nor one scene that is not pivotal to an understanding, and the development, of character and the outcome of the movie. In 80 spare minutes, Reichardt takes us deeper inside the economic and social malaise of the dispossessed than any other filmmaker in America could possibly be capable of.
Michelle Williams is utterly devastating as Wendy Carroll, a drifter passing through Oregon with her dog Lucy, on their way to what she hopes will be a better life, and gainful employment, in Alaska. With dignity and grace, Williams portrays a strong yet vulnerable young woman for whom nothing seemingly has gone right. We fear the worst for her throughout the film, and that real tragedy does not befall her by movie’s end is the greatest gift writer-director Reichardt will provide to any film audience this year.
For VanRamblings, films like Wendy and Lucy, and Cate Shortland’s equally bleak 2004 Australian export, Somersault – films where the central female character continually places herself in harm’s way, bereft of an instinct for survival that would occur to almost any one of us – are very real horror films, where every human emotion causes the viewer to want to yell out at the screen for the character not to move in a particular injurious direction. Sometimes the despair is so great, the pain so devastating, that you have to avert your eyes from the screen. Wendy and Lucy is one of our favourite films to screen at the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival, thus far in the Festival’s 2008 programme. Screens twice more, Sat, Oct 4 @ 1pm, Gran7, Th7; and Tue, Oct 7 @ 9pm, Gran7, Th4. A must-see.

Sad to say, 2008 has not proved to be a banner year on the international movie scene, at least from the perspective of what moviegoers have seen presented, so far, at the 27th annual Vancouver International Film Festival.
Festival Director Alan Franey may have searched the world for the best, and he may have found the best foreign cinema available, but best is a relative term. The films on offer at last year’s Festival represent more provocative, groundbreaking, and better made cinema than what we’re seeing this year.
That said, the films Vancouverites are being treated to (most of which will never return to the city outside of their Festival screenings) are, for the most part, worthy of a cinephile’s time inside the darkened Festival exhibition auditorium. For instance, the past couple of days we’ve seen …
I’ve Loved You So Long (Grade: B+): In these early days of the Oscar sweepstakes, the star of this French export, Kristin Scott Thomas, has to be considered an odds-on-favourite for an Oscar nod, and potential win come next February. Although a tad implausible in its overall explication (most particularly, when the “murder” is finally explained, towards movie’s end), in the film Scott Thomas plays Juliette, a woman just released from prison after serving a 15-year sentence for murder. Juliette comes to live with her younger sister, Lea (a radiant Elsa Zylberstein), husband Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), and their two children. Slowly, Juliette re-adjusts to the midde-class life she knew before her incarceration. One of the factors that makes I’ve Loved You So Long compelling viewing – apart from across the board strong performances (Laurent Grevill, as Michel, a colleague of Lea’s, is a particular standout, in a supporting role) – is the film’s superb, utterly original, touching and at times witty, and very funny, screenplay by writer-director Philippe Claudel. Playing for a final time this coming Sunday, Oct 5th at 1pm, at the Ridge Theatre. One of the 2008 VIFF must-sees.
Summer Hours (Grade: C+): A trifle, and too often a didactic one at that, Summer Hours presents an upper middle class family divesting their late mother’s estate. Overall, VanRamblings found it hard to root for the film’s group of overprivileged swells; the performances are simply too cool to be engaging. Most particularly, the film fails because too much screen time is given over to treatises on 20th century French art, and furniture design.
Three Monkeys (Grade: B-): How could you not love a film that looks like this? If the story line was pedestrian and uninvolving? If the characters were enigmatic and unengaging? Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film, in competition at Cannes this year, tells the mood driven story of a politician who convinces his driver, Eyup (Yavuz Bingol) to take the fall for a hit-and-run accident, with the promise of a big payday for the driver at the end of his sentence. From that moment on, nothing goes well: not for the politician, nor the driver’s wife or son, or even the driver once he’s released from prison. Gorgeous to look at, made with craft, but narratively tedious.
Chris and Don: A Love Story (Grade: B): VanRamblings is going to catch hell for not raving about this picture, but we’re very ho-hum about how the story of Christopher Isherwood and his paramour, Don Bachardy, is told. Isherwood is fascinating throughout; Bachardy, not so much. Given that Bachardy narrates the lion’s share of the film, viewers would have been better off with a consistent, articulate and insightful third-party narrator, rather than the inarticulate (if authentic) narrator Bachardy proves to be.

From the VIFF’s Canadian Images series, the following video by the folks at vancouver IAM, an interview with Cameron Labine, on his directorial début, Control Alt Delete, playing next Sunday & Monday at the Empire Granville 7.

Control Alt Delete screens Sunday, October 5, 7pm, Empire Granville 7, Theatre 7; and Monday, October 6, 4pm, Empire Granville 7, Theatre 7.
Thanks to Ian MacKenzie for directing our attention to the video above.