#Cinema | Holiday Oscar Awards Season, Part 2 | Best Picture Contenders

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With epic cinematic re-makes, like Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt and heart-breaking re-imagining of West Side Story, and ferociously inspiring biopics like King Richard in contention, Academy Awards Oscar voters have a plethora of worthy choices in a Best Picture category that has been set at full and expansive 10 slots this year.

The Academy Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 27th, 2022.

In last week’s Part 1 of VanRamblings’ Oscar preview, we wrote about all of the probable Oscar contenders that are readily available to you in the comfort of your home — available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or Apple TV.

This week, we’ll turn our focus to the Oscar contending films that will be available exclusively as an in-cinema experience — the best way to enjoy cinema.

A fundamentally and marvelously old-fashioned cinematic entertainment, a working class sports drama that is so authentic, appealing and engaging that it simply pulls you right in, King Richard is the story of the dream of Richard Williams — father to future tennis phenoms, five time Wimbeldon champion, Venus, and her younger sister, Serena, winner of 23 Grand Slam tournaments — this crowd-pleasing, socially alert story of perseverance, and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence, is VanRamblings’ favourite Hollywood film of 2021.

Further, we believe King Richard will win the 2022 Oscar for Best Picture, while also boasting this year’s presumed Best Actor front-runner in Will Smith.

Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene  Williams, Demi Singleton as Serena Williams. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

Aunjanue Ellis’ richly layered performance as Venus and Serena’s mother, Oracene ‘Brandy’ Williams — who winds up stealthily stealing the movie despite her co-star, Will Smith’s gravitational charisma — is nothing short of a revelation, possessed of an unshakeable source of love and balance for her husband Richard and their five children, in a magnificent character portrayal that deserves a shower of raves.

Rush out to see King Richard because, quite simply, it is a revelation.

The reviews are in for Steven Spielberg’s re-imagining of the 1961 Best Picture Oscar winning classic musical, West Side Story — and they’re all raves!

The critics are simply waxing poetic about this big screen cinematic reverie …

  • Says The Globe and Mail’s Arts Editor and ‘professional’ movie critic, Barry Hertz, “I would accuse Spielberg of playing the romantic fool — of being convinced that his audience will fall in love with whatever he’s already become smitten with or blinded by himself — but West Side Story proves that he is as annoyingly, lovingly, dastardly whip-smart as ever. This film is the reason that we go out to the movies, and should continue to do so for as long as the opportunity is afforded to us.”;
  • Writes Robbie Collin, in his five-star review in The Telegraph … “West Side Story is, I believe, Spielberg’s finest film in 20 years, and a new milestone in the career of one of our greatest living directors. A little less than a month before his 75th birthday, he has delivered a relentlessly dazzling, swoonily beautiful reworking of the 1957 Manhattan-set musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which feels just as definitive and indestructible as the previous screen adaptation, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.”

Ariana DeBose as Anita and David Alvarez as Bernardo in a scene from Spielberg’s new West Side Story

Opening a week today, on Friday, December 10th, Steven Spielberg’s heartfelt and heart-breaking adaptation of West Side Story remains faithful to its roots, and emerges for audiences today, alive to the concerns of the modern world.

Stunningly detailed, wickedly enjoyable, with an A-list cast up and down, director Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous and fantastically sinister moral fable about freak shows, dark and stormy nights, innocent dames, morally bankrupt schemers, and a femme fatale to die for, Nightmare Alley offers a gloomy dip into the dark side, immersive and bleak from start to finish.

You know. Just standard holiday film fare.

This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the dark margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for the most damnable creatures sparks life into Nightmare Alley, as it narrows towards its inevitable end. (Dec. 17)

Winner of the prestigious Audience Award at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, his semi-autobiographical account of growing up in Belfast during ‘The Troubles’, at only 97 minutes never overreaches, and could very well end up in Oscar’s top spot.

For VanRamblings, though, Belfast’s tenderly nostalgic memoir never coheres, but rather comes across as a low-rent version of Alfonso Cuarón’s personal tour de force, 2019’s Roma, which deftly captured the emotional balance of intimacy and the poetic power of a land in turmoil and transition, a necessary feat that Belfast fails to achieve.

Belfast, with its underdeveloped central characters — most especially Jamie Dornan and Catriona Balfe — is a film given to broad strokes, without ever locking the audience into an emotional perspective.

As such, Belfast emerges as only a scattershot pleaser, rendered with too little whimsy, and blarney left to spare. Still and all, film offers viewers a reflection on their own lives, a subjective and iconoclastic experience that may prove satisfactory for some viewers — as it did in Toronto this year. But, sorry to report, not for VanRamblings in any great or moving measure.

Critics who’ve seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s freewheeling, half-forgotten memoria of growing up in the golden, shimmering  suburban San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, Licorice Pizza, have found the film to be a tender, funny ramble forged in all the hope and absurdity of adolescence, the film carried on the shoulders of first-timers Alana Haim (Anderson has directed several of her band’s videos) and Cooper Hoffman (son of frequent Anderson collaborator, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman), both actors thoroughly engaging in their début performances.

Christie Lemire writes,”Haim is just a flat-out movie star. She has that “thing”: that radiant, magnetic charisma that makes it impossible to take your eyes off her.”

Clearly, Licorice Pizza is just the sort of small, under-the-radar film that audiences find, and are wowed by. An irresistible and delectably euphoric film, Licorice Pizza emerges as more than just a film, it is a playful, sentimental reminder of what it means to be young, as well as an embodiment of what it feels like to grow up.

A beyond-dazzling re-imagining of Cyrano de Bergerac, novelist Edmond Rostand’s fictionalization of the early 17th century playwright, epistolarian, and duelist Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, director Joe Wright’s charmingly poignant musical version of the 1897 stage play, offers vivid performances, intoxicating bravado, and a ravishing Roxanne (played by Haley Bennett, with whom Wright is besotted in real life). Cyrano took the Telluride Film Festival by storm — as may well be the case with you, and your family and friends.

Yet another true holiday film treat.

Of course, there are at least a dozen more films to sweep you off your feet this extended holiday Oscar movie season, including Joachim Trier’s revelatory The Worst Person in the World, VanRamblings’ favourite film of 2021, and a certain Oscar contender for Best International Film.

Sad to say, though, Trier’s latest film — which débuted at the Cannes Film Festival in July, winning the Best Actress prize for lead Renate Reinsve — won’t hit screens in the Metro Vancouver region until January 2022.

Dutch director Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta — a substantial, sophisticated, yet briskly paced and always highly entertaining drama, the story of a 17th-century nun in Italy who suffers from disturbing religious and erotic visions — balances quiet scenes of shrewd backroom politicking with lurid scenes of wild religious madness. A big hit at Cannes. Set to be released on December 21st.

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket features Simon Rex as an ex-Porn star returning to his small town home. Critics at Cannes loved Red Rocket, a humane comedy, a portrait of romantic douchebaggery & an America of flailing last chances.

Recommended.

Finally, for today, we’ll leave you with Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, starring an Oscar-bound Penélope Cruz, in  a film of cascading twists and turns, of thickening complication, of high family drama.

Hearing that, you might imagine that it’s a movie of high comedy as well — a giddy and ironic Almodóvarian stew of maternal diva melodrama.

But Parallel Mothers, while it keeps us hooked on what’s happening with a showman’s finesse, is not a comedy. It’s not an over-the-top Pedro party. Rather, it’s an unabashedly serious movie, one so straightforwardly sculpted and emotionally down-to-earth that there’s no distance between the audience and what’s happening onscreen.

Parallel Mothers is as serious as any film Almodóvar has made, but in this case he hasn’t let go of his luminously light, beguiling, puckish side. Parallel Mothers draws you in and holds you. It’s Almodóvar’s disarming tribute to the shifting, ever-bending bonds of motherhood, and the inexorable pull of family.

New York Film Critics Circle Winners (announced Friday, December 3, 2021)

Best Film: Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Sideshow and Janus Films)
Best Director: Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Actress: Lady Gaga, House of Gucci (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Supporting Actor: Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog (Netflix)
Best Supporting Actress: Kathryn Hunter, The Tragedy of Macbeth (Apple Original Films/A24)
Best Screenplay: Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza (MGM/United Artists Releasing)
Best Animated Film: The Mitchells vs. The Machines (Netflix)
Best Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski, West Side Story (20th Century Studios)
Best First Film: Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Lost Daughter (Netflix)
Best Foreign Language Film: The Worst Person in the World (Norway)
Best Nonfiction Film: Flee (Neon)

#VanPoli | Team for a Livable Vancouver Holds Its Founding AGM

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Architect & charter TEAM for a Livable Vancouver member Brian Palmquist speaks at TEAM’s AGM

Team for a Livable Vancouver, our town’s newest political party, held it’s first AGM on Sunday evening, an event open only to members of the nascent political party.

Jak King, a longtime Grandview-Woodland and community activist, was one of 12 policy committee speakers addressing Sunday evening’s AGM.

Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick was the evening’s keynote speaker.

Brian Palmquist, an award-winning architect, provided an Affordability Policy analysis at Sunday evening’s founding event, which took place at the Anza Club on 3 West 8th Avenue. Mr. Palmquist is the author of the substack newsletter, The PATH Project, where he reflects regularly on development in the city of Vancouver, recently emerging — along with UBC’s Patrick Condon — as an increasingly important voice in civic politics, and as a regular speaker at Vancouver City Hall debates.

Unlike the fancy soirées conducted by Ken Sim and his newly-formed A Better City municipal party, or Mark Marissen’s Progress Vancouver event, both of which drew dozens of well-heeled supporters — as well as all the press that matters (no journalist worth her or his salt foregoes a free meal), the founding TEAM AGM was — surprising to many — a members only event, a decidedly déclassé affair, with a solid and upbeat attendance, nonetheless, of those party members who’ve been working with Team for a Livable Vancouver founder, Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick, to transform Vancouver into a more “livable city” for all.

Sunday evening’s founding TEAM AGM — which, in the early going, would seem to be a no press ‘we don’t want any of those stinkin’ wretches‘ allowed — which for us would seem to comprise an kind of odd, almost stealth campaign for office, a members only ‘ if you don’t love us, we don’t love you’ civic party that somehow possesses definitive plans on sweeping to office at Vancouver City Hall, at Park Board and at School Board, come Saturday, October 15, 2022. Sunday’s AGM follows on the heels of a series of policy workshops organized by Councillor Hardwick in October. VanRamblings was unable to find anyone in Team for a Livable Vancouver to speak on, or off, the record about Sunday’s AGM.

Allow VanRamblings to say that we believe that come the latter part of September 2022, leading up to October 15th Vancouver civic election day, a groundswell of support for Team for a Livable Vancouver will embolden voters to cast their ballot for TEAM — despite whatever jerks like VanRamblings have to say on the matter, in the months leading up to next year’s Vancouver municipal election — and that TEAM will sweep to victory, in the same manner COPE did in 2002, and Vision Vancouver achieved in 2008, surprising many.

TEAM’s October 24th Policy Conference, where 12 groups developed TEAM party policy

VanRamblings was told, simply, to wait for a series of announcements and a new and dynamic party website that will emerge throughout the month of December.

TEAM’s founding Board of Directors, former Green Party civic candidate and architect, David Wong; longtime community activist Sal Robinson; current Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick; founder of the VanPoli Facebook group, community activist, and Oscar-winning animator (and probable TEAM Park Board candidate), David Fine; and outgoing TEAM Board member, Sean Nardi.

As Sean Nardi wrote in the hours following the TEAM founding AGM …

“TEAM elected its first, 9-member Board of Directors, a talented, concerned group who bring a diversity of skills, experience, knowledge and perspectives to guide TEAM’s evolution.”

For the moment, the party is playing its cards close to the vest, and at least for now the party has taken down both of its websites, the initial https://voteforteam.ca/, and more recently, http://www.teamlivablevancouver.ca/.

It would seem that, arising from VanRamblings persnicketyness (there are those who employ harsher language), Team for a Livable Vancouver moved up the début of its audacious and snazzy new website, which may be found at …

https://www.voteteam.ca/ 

VanRamblings had been told that TEAM’s webmaster was something of a perfectionist — you can see for yourself what that means (pretty great, we think).

VanRamblings received a call from a TEAM founding member, this a.m. …

“Ray, I think you’re going to be impressed with who the nine people are who were selected as TEAM’s new Board members. They’re a pretty impressive group, who in the days and weeks to come will play an ever increasingly important role in working to develop policy, and a narrative on what TEAM stands for. Over time, Colleen will play an ever diminishing role in directing the affairs of the civic party she has worked so hard to create. Colleen will turn her focus to becoming Vancouver’s next Mayor on Saturday, October 15, 2022, and carrying her team to office.

The announcement of the new Board members, and the launch of the new website , will occur in short order, perhaps as soon as next week. The launch of Team for a Livable Vancouver bodes well for all of us, and most particularly, for the citizens of Vancouver.”

VanRamblings awaits future Team for a Livable Vancouver announcements.

#VanPoli | Trans Rights | Never Let Hate Nor the Politics of Expedience Win

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Former British prime minister Tony Blair. (Tayfun Salci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Tony Blair, and the Rise of Lowest Common Denominator Politics

Like your uncle in the family group chat, in these pandemic times of ours, Tony Blair has once again given his unsolicited opinion on politics.

The former three-term British Labour Prime Minister has urged Britain’s main opposition leader, Labour leader Keir Starmer, to “reject the wokeism of the minority” if he wants to win the next general election.

In a blistering appraisal of the Labour Party leader, Blair blasted the party’s decline. The hard left, Blair wrote in the foreword of a new report into Labour voters published this past Friday, November 26th, by the firm Deltapoll for the Tony Blair for Global Change Institute, must be considered the “enemy”.

Blair urged Labour to adopt a “commonsensical position on the ‘culture’ issues”, likening Labour’s current situation with voters to 1983, when the party was pelted over its support for LGB(T)G2+ rights. Blair argued that “large numbers of Labour voters in 1983 felt our economic policy was not credible and our attitudes across a range of cultural questions profoundly alienating”.

Tony Blair said Labour must ‘turn a corner’ under Sir Keir Starmer to win the next general election

Blair has long felt that trans rights – the rights of one of the most marginalized and vulnerable demographics in the country — are part of a culture war that Labour must distance itself from, at one point warning Labour to not “look askance” at JK Rowling over her views. Veteran moderates such as Blair himself, he said, “don’t quite understand the strength in feeling over issues such as trans rights”. To speak out for trans rights, he said, is an “electoral off-putting position for Labour”.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler blamed the Jews, the disabled and homosexuals for Germany’s decline. Within a dozen years, the Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews, and 2 million disabled persons & members of the LGBTQ community.

Throughout our history, members of the gay community have had no rights, have lived in the shadows. All that changed in the 1970s with the rise of the gay rights movement, made ever more urgent when AIDS disproportionately affected that community. Even as recently as 2005, former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton didn’t recognize the gay community as having inalienable rights, never mind the right to marry.

More change was wrought when, only six years ago, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges that a fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Fourteenth Amendment, and that states must allow same-sex marriage.

Paul Martin’s Liberal government legislated same sex marriage in 2005.

Canadian astrophysicist Amita Kuttner, interim leader of the Green Party of Canada, and the first transgender, non-binary leader of a Canadian political party.

Here we are in 2021.

Which much discriminated against and disenfranchised group of citizens among us is left for us to blame our tales of woe on? Donald Trump had a ready answer to that question: members of the transgender community, who he ordered on April 12, 2019 to be discharged from service in the U.S. military.

“The Trump Administration is built on demonizing minority groups; reversing the civil rights gains of immigrants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ movement. We cannot let an incompetent administration guided by a petulant bigot stand as the mascot of our time,” wrote Harper Jean Tobin, Director of Policy for the National Center for Transgender Equality, in 2019.

President Joe Biden reversed, then eliminated Trump’s execrable order.


What’s wrong with us? Why isn’t Vancouver City Councillor Sarah Kirby-Yung our most sought after, most inevitable 2022 star candidate for Mayor of Vancouver? #DraftSarah

In 2021, no thinking and compassionate person would come out against the rights of our immigrant communities, our black and Asian populations, our Jewish community, the rights of girls and women to lead productive lives, nor deny the inalienable rights of members of our LGB(T)Q2+ communities.

Yet, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair not only finds it acceptable to dehumanize members of the trans community, but actually gives instruction to Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, to work against the interests of the transgender community, as he believes support for trans people is “alienating” for the working class British electorate who might otherwise vote for Labour, were it not for Labour’s turn to what he terms as ‘wokeism’.

Note should be made, too, that not one of Vancouver’s announced, or projected, 2022 Mayoral candidates — ABC’s Ken Sim, the NPA’s John Coupar — although, John did retweet the Bloedel Conservatory’s acknowledgement —  Progress Vancouver’s Mark Marissen, TEAM’s Colleen Hardwick, Coalition Vancouver’s Wai Young, nor anyone associated with OneCity Vancouver, the Greens or COPE, acknowledged the Trans Day of Remembrance, on Saturday, November 20th.

Into Light shares the story of a mother and child undergoing a transformative exploration of gender identity | Directed by filmmaker Sheona McDonald | Provided by the National Film Board of Canada

If our projected 2022 Mayoral candidates have failed to acknowledge our transgender community, at least someone at Vancouver City Hall has.

#GeoPolitics | Autocratic Regimes | A Shift in Power

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The rise of right wing populism in the United States brought on by the election of Donald Trump

We live in a troubled and troubling world, with the ravages of climate emergency a danger to us all — most particularly, British Columbians in 2021, living through a heat dome crisis in June, consuming province-wide wildfires this past summer, and now, flooding, economic devastation, and the destruction of roads and bridges that serve to exacerbate an execrable supply chain crisis.

And, then, there’s the politics of the western world, where authoritarianism and autocratic regimes across the globe have become even more brazen in their repression. Many democratic governments are backsliding and are adopting authoritarian tactics by restricting free speech and weakening the rule of law, a trend exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The political flaws and social fault lines revealed by the pandemic will drive more people towards populist and authoritarian leaders that seldom deliver durable solutions for the concerns of citizens”, says International IDEA Secretary-General Kevin Casas-Zamora. “If there is one key message in the Global State of Democracy Report 2021 — Building Resilience in a Pandemic Era”, published by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm, “it is that now is the time for democracies to be bold, to innovate and revitalize themselves. The Global State of Democracy report is not a wakeup call, it’s an alarm bell. Authoritarianism advances in every corner of the earth. Universal values — the pillars of civilization that protect the most vulnerable — are under threat.”

While many democracies have proved resilient during the pandemic, by expanding democratic innovations and adapting their practices and institutions in record time, in order to preserve our democracies, as Casas-Zamora states, bold action was required by our leaders to innovate and revitalize themselves.

Cuba’s pro democracy protesters take to the streets, to fight rising poverty and high COVID-19 numbers

One of the key findings of the report is the strength of civic activism all over the world. Pro-democracy movements have braved repression in places such as Belarus, Cuba, Eswatini, Myanmar, and Sudan, and global social movements for tackling climate change and fighting racial injustice have thrived.

More than 80 countries have experienced protests and civic action of different kinds during the pandemic despite often harsh government restrictions.

Asia and the Pacific has suffered a wave of growing authoritarianism as crises of various kinds have affected Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Myanmar. Democratic erosion is also widespread, including in India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka with many of them suffering from rising ethno-nationalism and the militarization of politics. China’s influence, coupled with its own deepening autocratization, also puts the legitimacy of the democratic model at risk.

In Africa and the Middle East, while elections remain the norm, the report states the democratic quality of these elections is on the decline and attempts to evade or remove presidential term limits present a risk to democracy.  2021 has seen four military coups: in Chad, Guinea-Conakry, Mali and Sudan.

The Middle East’s tainted track record on protecting civil liberties has been even further strained by the pandemic, with many elections held with the sole aim of keeping existing regimes in power, such as in Algeria, Egypt and Syria.

Moscow gripped with the largest anti-government demonstrations since the winter of 2011-12

The rise of autocracy and of right wing populism, its western democratic cousin, gives rise to understandable concern that liberal political values and the rule of law are heading towards terminal decline.

However, neither autocratic states such as China and Russia nor right wing populist leaders like Donald Trump in the U.S., Italy’s Matteo Salvini and right wing populist leaders in other western countries have had everything go their way. Their mixed fortunes suggest that it is premature to write off the prospects for global governance, even though the rules-based order constructed after 1945 is decomposing and will never return in its old form.

The Chinese and Russian states possess immense resources of violence and intimidation that allow them to suppress dissent with ease. From Tiananmen Square in 1989 on, China has proved that it has an unyielding state of mind, one that augurs poorly for Hong Kong protesters.

However, there is less tolerance for politically related violence in European societies, as demonstrated by the public backlash in Slovakia against the murder of Ján Kuciak, an investigative journalist, and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová.

Should right wing populism fail to make deeper inroads in western political systems, owing to its unrealistic promises and policy confusion when in power, the deliberate disruption of the post-1945 global order would arguably slow down. The growing internal challenges of autocratic systems in countries such as Russia and Turkey might reinforce this trend.

However, the most important long-term trends in international relations over the past 30 years have been the rise of China and the accelerating shift of economic power from the west to the Asia-Pacific region.

That shift ensures that the Washington-designed post-1945 order, built mainly for the benefit of the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan and their allies, in the years to come will give way to a more dispersed form of global governance.

For the west, the cold reality is not that autocracy will triumph and democracy will fail, but rather that the 500-year-long era of western global supremacy is slowly and inexorably coming to an end.