Vancouver’s newest theatre is now open. Marine Gateway, at Marine and Cambie, is classy, state-of-the-art and great looking, with about the same capacity as Scotiabank downtown. I got to see it at a media preview this week.
The main floor has eight theatres, one of them a premium AVX auditorium, and a huge lobby and concession.
Upstairs there are three VIP theatres where you can order food and drinks brought right to your seat. That includes alcohol so no minors are allowed. The seats are large, leather covered and slightly reclining with extra legroom. You pay twice as much as downstairs which I don’t think is worth it but it does work at two other locations, Coquitlam and Abbotsford.
And, I wondered, how long does The Park Theatre at Cambie and 17th have now that Gateway is open? The lease is up next month but Jason de Courcy, the Cineplex vice-president for western Canada, assured me that the company intends to keep operating The Park. “I love single-screen theatres,” he said.
In an unrelated note, the annual Women in Film Festival opens at the VanCity Theatre on Tuesday and runs for five days. Next week I’ll review a special film playing near the end but you can read about them all at www.womeninfilm.ca
And these are new in theatres today …
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: 3 stars
Zootopia: 4 ½
Embrace the Serpent: 4
The Wave: 3 ½
London Has Fallen: 2
The Legend of Barney Thompson: 2 ½
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT: Tina Fey’s wartime excursion to Afghanistan is at times funny, often playful and generally well-written and acted. And yet there’s something insubstantial here. It hardly justifies the WTF implied in the title. The humor is too gentle and not black enough. And the source book’s reflections on war in general, and that war in particular, are reduced to one-line comments. What we do get we’ve seen before: western reporters huddling, partying and comparing notes as they cover a conflict they don’t quite understand. It’s smart and entertaining but could have been much more.
Tina plays Kim Barker who was in Afghanistan for five years as the bureau chief for a Chicago newspaper. The film has her as a rookie TV reporter from New York and keen to make her mark in a man’s world. That’s a Tina Fey specialty and she delivers. We get risky battle coverage and amusing scenes encountering locals, standing up to a US Marine commander (Billy Bob Thornton), romancing a photographer (Martin Freeman) partying with an experienced reporter (Margo Robbie) and resisting the advances of an Afghan politician (Alfred Molina). But the film is soft on her growing cynicism about the war and the conduct of the U.S. and her own qualms about the adrenaline rush she’s growing to like in the war zone. It's what made her leave and go back home. An old book review said she saw herself as sort of a Tina Fey character. The script doesn’t have Tina as enough of a Kim Barker character. (Gateway, 5th Avenue, International Village and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
ZOOTOPIA: This is one of the best animated films ever from Disney. It’s just as entertaining for adults as it is for children without pandering to either. Kids will like the basic story, a female rabbit who strives to rise above her place, leave her parents’ carrot farm and join the police force in the city. Parents will delight in the film noir mystery that she gets involved in and the intelligent take on real issues like prejudice and fear-mongering leaders. There are cultural references that are actually witty not ham-handed as in so many other films like this. There’s a terrific Godfather spoof, a mayor’s affirmative action program called a “mammal inclusion initiative” and in a very funny scene an encounter with some very slow office clerks.
Judy Hopps is the bunny (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and Jason Batemen is a hustler fox she has to ally with to solve a case. That’s because the police captain (a water buffalo voiced by Idris Elba) thinks she’s too small for any police work except the parking detail. She pursues a case anyway. There are missing mammal reports the police are neglecting, one brought by Mrs. Otterton (Oscar winner Octavia Spencer). Judy finds a conspiracy that threatens to bust apart a delicate truce in the city between predators and their usual prey. There’s big action and spectacular animation. And there’s a quirky sense of humor. The directors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore have films like Bolt, Wreck-It Ralph and The Simpsons in their background. And yes, Peter Mansbridge voices a character. It’s hardly a stretch though. Just two lines as a TV newsreader. (Gateway, International Village and suburban theatres) 4 ½ out of 5
EMBRACE THE SERPENT: It didn’t win the Academy Award for best foreign language film but it’s absolutely proper that it was nominated. This is a bracing essay on cultural clashes between developed and so-called primitive societies. And a potent attack on colonialism, which is an ever-present force in the background. Columbian filmmaker Ciro Guerra created it to let the people of the Amazon region tell their story. For us, visually, it’s like stepping back in time and into a wondrous, pristine place.
The story is fictional but inspired by two ethnographers who came there some 40 years apart. It shows us the corrosive effects of contact over that time. First there was a German in search of a medicinal cure but rebuffed by a shaman who says “I don’t help whites.” He’s bitter; his people were wiped out by the rubber industry. But when he’s told there are some left, he agrees to help. He leads him to an aboriginal settlement and on a dramatic visit to a Christian mission where children are forbidden to speak “pagan languages.” (Much like Canada’s residential schools.) The second scientist is an American, on the same quest, led by the same shaman (now played by a much older actor) and encountering a surreal and damning change at that mission. Within the two visits we also get a host other issues separating the cultures: attitudes to nature, science, violence, dreams, memories. It’s not preachy. It’s like a stimulating conversation that gets quite heated at times.(VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
THE WAVE: You want to get your nerves rattled? A disaster flick is what you want and this one from Norway, with a killer tsunami, is one of the most effective I’ve ever seen. It’s a non-Hollywood version; real-looking, dark and moody, not bright and slick like say, San Andreas from last year. It’s particularly resonant here in BC because the fiords, shores and mountains of Norway look exactly like our landscapes. We’re always told of “the big one” sure to come and rock slides are common.
In this story, based on a real disaster many years ago, an unstable mountain causes the catastrophe. It’s above a tourist town called Geiranger and has an internal fissure that a government early warning centre is monitoring. Sensors in a crevasse detect an annual expansion of about 15 centimeters. A geologist (Kristoffer Joner), on the very day he’s to leave for another job, senses something bigger is happening. When it comes, bringing a huge wall of water, power outages and a traffic jam of people trying to get away, you’ll be on the edge. The tension builds inexorably up to the deluge. As the wave comes crashing in, the geologist has to find his family. The director, Roar Uthaug, expertly choreographs the action and the suspense. Hollywood has already snapped him up for a film. This one says Norway has 300 unstable mountainsides. Make you wonder about BC. (VanCity Theatre) 3 ½ out of 5
LONDON HAS FALLEN: Even today, you don’t see many movies as relentless as this. There’s more spraying of machine gun bullets than most any gangster or even war movie. There are car chases, swarms of motorcycles coming at you, helicopter explosions, iconic buildings demolished (not the gherkin, though) and a lot of running through the streets, subway tunnels and alleys. Now if only the story was intelligent, not ridiculous as this.
Gerard Butler and Aaron Eckhart are back from their surprise 2013 hit Olympus Has Fallen in which Butler, as a secret service agent, rescued Eckhart, as the U.S. president, from Korean kidnappers. Now they’re off to London for a state funeral, along with dozens of other world leaders including Canada’s prime minister here named Robert Bowman. At St. Paul’s Cathedral guys dressed as police suddenly start shooting at them. Bowman’s car is blown up. Somebody is trying kill them all, but mainly the US leader. That’s because his drone jockeys in Nevada had blown up a wedding in Pakistan and killed the daughter of an arms dealer and terrorist. We get an hour and a half of retaliation. Also back are Morgan Freeman as the vice president and Angela Bassett as the head of the secret service. We get some really heavy violence and some ripe dialogue including this U.S. boast: “A thousand years from now we’ll still be here.” (Gateway, Scotiabank and suburban theatres) 2 out of 5
THE LEGEND OF BARNEY THOMPSON: This is a fairly engrossing comedy directed by and starring Robert Carlyle as a malcontent barber and stolen by Emma Thompson as his brassy, crass and outrageous mother. She’s hilarious in a film that’s generally only amusing. Fans of Scottish films like Trainspotting and Shallow Grave will recognize the mordant humor that seems to flourish in that country. This is from a popular novel by Douglas Lindsay and set in Glasgow although, as a co-production with Canada, a bit of it was filmed here.
Carlyle as Barney is so morose at work as a barber that nobody wants him to cut their hair. The boss is about to fire him but in a tussle Barney accidentally stabs him dead. Bad move, not least because there’s a serial killer about mailing body parts to the police. Naturally he comes under suspicion. Mom helps with an off-the-wall solution, probably just to speed things up so she can get to her bingo night. Ray Winstone intimidates as the investigating cop, Tom Courtenay, oddly foul mouthed is the police chief and Ashley Jensen is the imperious supervisor who insists “this is not a barber-based crime.” But Barney is clumsy and kills a second guy. Worse he’s got a friend with a habit of showing up at just the wrong time and catching hints of what he’s doing. Director Carlyle’s comedy ranges from droll to noisy to broad and stumbling. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5
Carlyle as Barney is so morose at work as a barber that nobody wants him to cut their hair. The boss is about to fire him but in a tussle Barney accidentally stabs him dead. Bad move, not least because there’s a serial killer about mailing body parts to the police. Naturally he comes under suspicion. Mom helps with an off-the-wall solution, probably just to speed things up so she can get to her bingo night. Ray Winstone intimidates as the investigating cop, Tom Courtenay, oddly foul mouthed is the police chief and Ashley Jensen is the imperious supervisor who insists “this is not a barber-based crime.” But Barney is clumsy and kills a second guy. Worse he’s got a friend with a habit of showing up at just the wrong time and catching hints of what he’s doing. Director Carlyle’s comedy ranges from droll to noisy to broad and stumbling. (International Village) 2 ½ out of 5