Things move fast these days. Last Sunday, Jojo Rabbit won the coveted people’s choice award at the Toronto Film Festival and here it’s already sold out for its one screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct 2. As usual you can line up for those few standby tickets they’ll have available. Or wait until it opens for real on Oct 18.
The message is clear though. Popular tickets do go fast at VIFF, and some of those titles don’t come back nearly as fast. Some never do.
They’ve just added another film to the line up too: Atlantics one of the big winners at Cannes this year. It plays late on Oct 7 at the Rio.
Meanwhile, there are festival-worthy films among the new ones this week.
Downton Abbey: 4 stars
Ad Astra: 2 ½
Once Were Brothers: 3 ½
Miles Davis Birth of the Cool: 4
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?: 3
Dying to Survive: 3
Rambo Last Blood: --
DOWNTON ABBEY: Even if you’ve never watched the TV series (I’m one of those) you can enjoy this continuation of the Crawley family saga. It’s self-contained and I didn’t even really need the quick recap that I got from a fan (although it was helpful). Her biggest question was how can they continue the story when all the issues were happily settled in the last episode? Simple: Julian Fellowes, the writer, has all the characters back in a brand new tale.
The King and Queen are coming for a visit, on their way to a military parade next day. The staff is aflutter. Mrs Patmore (Lesley Nicol) will get to show off her cooking; Carson, the retired butler (Jim Carter), is brought back. His replacement is deemed too inexperienced for such an occasion and gets into a dicey outside encounter. Inside, the film delivers what the fans like, the people they know and the vision of a genteel English society that seems so bygone these days.
There are innovations. Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess, quick as always with her biting wit, is irritated over a new character. She has a dispute over an inheritance with a cousin (Imelda Staunton) who arrives as part of the royal entourage. Some surprise revelations come out over that. The staff are offended that the royals have brought their own chef, even their own food, and an imperious aide takes charge. A surreptitious rebellion forms in response. There’s an unrelated incident that seems out of place but also a parade of soldiers on horseback that fits in well and adds some big screen color. The film is like a piece of good pastry: a delight. (5th Avenue, International Village, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres everywhere. 4 out of 5
AD ASTRA: You buy a ticket for a space trip, you don’t expect a morose, plodding probe of daddy-didn’t-love-me-enough issues. They’re here though; they’re pondered endlessly and they eventually slow this exciting voyage down to a crawl. You’ll find some high marks for it out there among critics who detect profundity in its musings about our personal place in the universe and its insights like “In the end, the son suffers from the sins of the father.” Brad Pitt says that line in one of many voiceovers that pop up to make plain what he’s thinking but have the effect of gradually closing the throttle. A better payoff at the end could have rescued the film, but no.
Earlier it’s an expansive and beautiful look into our future in space. There’s a thrilling over-the-side repair sequence, fast food places like Subway on the moon, bandits chasing in dune buggies and elaborate infrastructure that enables rocket launches from there and from Mars. The facilities look much like 2001 A Space Odyssey but where that film pondered human evolution and technology, this one sends Pitt looking for his father (Tommy Lee Jones). He’s been missing for 30 years, probably on Jupiter, and now may be the cause of power surges that threaten Earth and all the planets. It’s Heart of Darkness again, much like in Apocalypse Now.
It’s a pretty good premise for a sci fi movie. Pitt realizes he’s been brought on the mission under false pretenses and does his own thing. That includes sneaking onto a rocket ship just as it’s about to launch, which seems unlikely but adventure beckons and … well, get ready to contemplate. This is a thinking person’s space movie. The thoughts are familiar but the direction by James Gray is smooth, the visual effects are amazing and the cast, which also includes Donald Sutherland and Ruth Negga, performs well. It’s the script that fails to engage us all the way. (Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres.) 2 ½ out of 5
ONCE WERE BROTHERS: This film opened the Toronto Film Festival this year and I can see why. It’s a lively, highly engrossing and information-packed history of a Canadian success. The Band was trained by Ronnie Hawkins (in Toronto but of Arkansas) and brought to world attention by Bob Dylan (of New York at the time). With an American drummer, Levon Helm, and four Canadians, led by Robbie Robertson, they startled the FM-radio crowd in the late 60s with a rootsie sound and songs about Old Dixie, Cripple Creek and The Weight. Robertson recalls that he found the inspiration for that last one literally inside a guitar.
The film is almost all based on his memories (which he wrote in a book and tells on screen). The rest is a collection of performance clips and a starry line-up of admirers, including Martin Scorcese, who directed their classic concert film, The Last Waltz, Bruce Springsteen, Jann Wenner, Van Morrison and Eric Clapton, who recalls he once wanted to join the band. The film is full of stories: Robertson learning he is half Jewish, as well as First Nations; suffering the boos when playing behind Dylan when he went electric, rising spectacularly on their own and then seeing “a darkness” come over them. Drinking, drug taking, car accidents and an internal dispute are detailed. “So beautiful, it went up in flames,” Robertson says. One-sided or not, there’s drama in this documentary. (International Village) 3 ½ out of 4
MILES DAVIS: BIRTH OF THE COOL: He was cool; this film isn’t. Early on maybe, when it feels like a standard life sketch of a jazz innovator. Then it digs deeper and becomes a multi-layered study of a complex man, driven to make music, searching for his own sound, feeling insecure at times, angry just as often, particularly about racism in America, anti-social and depressed, drug addicted until his friends rescued him. Many appear to talk about him, including Herbie Hancock, Carlos Santana, George Wein, Quincy Jones and his first wife Frances Taylor.The actor Carl Lumbly reads his words and it’s as if Davis is narrating his own story.
He was the son of a dentist in East St. Louis, absorbed all kinds of music, got himself invited to and discovered at the Newport Jazz Festival and loved to visit Paris where he was accepted without mention of his race. He met intellectuals, scored a movie for Louis Malle and romanced Juliet Greco. Back in the US, he became depressed and paranoid. He died of a stroke in 1991.There are generous excerpts from his music and full background on some of his classic albums like Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. And above all, a deep appreciation of his sound. Harbie Hancock says it’s “like a stone skippin’ across a pond.” After DOXA in May, it’s back at the VanCity Theatre for three days. Saturday is still OK; tonight and Sunday may require a standby wait. 4 out of 5
WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THE WORLD’S ON FIRE?: If you thought the Oscar winner Green Book is too namby pamby a look at race relations in the United States, here’s the antidote. It’s bracing and urgent. This documentary is real and not tempered to be polite in any way; just determined to show the anger some people feel. Showing the struggle in two states (Louisiana and Mississippi), it was filmed by a Texan, Roberto Minervini, with Italian in his heritage, and a history of tough-minded filmmaking. He tells four stories and cuts back and forth among them.
A pair of brothers ride their bikes and support each other trying to keep out of the trouble happening on the streets. One hopes to get a car when his dad gets out of jail. Judy, a former drug addict and thief, struggles to keep her bar going, while hard-pressed to pay her bills and gentrification creeps closer. Mardi Gras revellers chant, dance and sing in the one upbeat side to the film. The toughest shows the New Black Panther Party holding a demonstration about the murder of a black man. He had been beheaded. Black people don’t kill that way; whites do, shouts a woman in the lead. She blames the KKK and demands access to a government building to make her case. A fight with the police breaks out instead. The film doesn’t mention competing theories but with sights of the “n” word on a school sign and on cars in a black neighborhood, it doesn’t expect calm talk anyway. (Cinematheque) 3 out of 5
DYING TO SURVIVE: I guess it’s remarkable that China allowed this film to be shown at all. It reveals collusion between a foreign drug company and government officials. Bribes and payoffs. It celebrates the work of some people to break the law and get around official regulations. Maybe the censors, who are usually so active, recognized how popular it might be. It did become a huge hit, won awards and has many people comparing it to the American film, Dallas Buyers Club. The story is similar. It’s also true, though all the names are changed.
Leukemia patients were being charged outrageous prices for a drug imported from Switzerland. A small-time store owner selling herbal aphrodisiacs is told by one of these patients that a generic version of the same drug was available in India for a fraction of the price. All he had to do was dare to smuggle it in. Xu Zheng, known as a comic actor, plays him with a decidedly light tone as he heads to the busling streets over there, negotiates with the sellers and brings the product home to Shanghai. He has to convince potential buyers that the product is safe and outwit the authorities who claim it is counterfeit. He brings a Christian pastor along to help promote the drug and divert a quack drug seller pushing a real counterfeit. There are set-backs, a truck chase, a near riot and a court case, and surprisingly a lot of humor along the way in this zippy and entertaining film. TRIVIA: the son who is sent for an overseas education early in the film seems to be on his way to Vancouver. A minor detail, but interesting. (VanCity Theatre) 3 out of 5
Also now playing (all over):
RAMBO: LAST BLOOD: No previews for this one. Don’t the distributors know that this series started around here? First Blood was filmed in Hope in the early 80s. Of course in the third film (of now five) John Rambo went to Afghanistan to straighten things out there and look how that’s turned out. Maybe we’re not missing much as he, played by now 72-year-old Sylvester Stallone, comes out of retirement to take on the favorite bad guys for these days, the Mexican drug cartels. They’ve adducted a friend’s granddaughter for the sex trade and he goes to get her back. Even unseen, it’s not hard to predict this one.