Along with a full slate of movies today, some of them award worthy, you've got the Vancouver Irish Film Festival to consider. The first last year was a big success and the offerings are good again. I’m judging by the descriptions and the reputations. A Bump Along the Way and Rosie are both award winners (the latter is by Roddy Doyle set amid the housing crisis in Dublin), the documentary Gaza is Ireland's submission to the Academy Awards and The Camino Voyage has four artists and musicians paddling their way to Spain in a traditional Irish canoe. You'll remember one of them, singer Glen Hansard from the hit film Once. Also a very charming children's film, Into the West, has been brought back as a family presentation.
The festival is on through the weekend at the Van City Theatre and you can read more about it at www.virff.org
That full slate I mentioned has these on it:
Marriage Story: 4 ½ stars
Knives Out: 4
Dark Waters: 3 ½
Queen & Slim: 3 ½
Stand!: 2 ½
Honey Boy: 3
MARRIAGE STORY: This is a superb and very affecting film but my advice? See it only if your marriage is secure. This one gets awfully rough, initially as it breaks down but then even more so when it descends into a legal minefield called divorce. You could be into some very uncomfortable conversations yourself after watching Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson act out this one. What’s splitting them isn’t that convincing. It’s something about where to live in the US, New York or California. Careers depend on the choice but you’d think they could work that out.
Not so and despite mouthing best intentions they get themselves into the clutches of divorce lawyers played by Laura Dern, Alan Alda, and Ray Liotta. One is nice; two say go for the jugular. Custody of their son is part of the dispute and adds emotional snags but oddly not nearly the anguish we saw in Kramer Vs Kramer. This film gets deep into the legal details, the conflicting recommendations and every step through the process. There’s been a lot of talk that writer-director Noah Baumbach put in much of what he went through in his own divorce. True or not, the film has a strong air of reality, seems to take the man’s side a little more than the woman’s and has harsh observations about the divorce industry. Strong acting by all deliver his thoughts forcefully. It’s in a few theatres before playing on Netflix and is bound to be a contender in many categories at the Oscars. (VanCity Theatre) 4 ½ out of 5
KNIVES OUT: We don’t get many drawing room murder mysteries of the classic style these days. That makes this one most welcome, especially since it’s very good and comes with a powerhouse cast. A novelist and publisher (Christopher Plummer) is found dead, maybe by suicide, maybe not. Investigating are two policemen and a private detective hired by an anonymous client and played by Daniel Craig. He speaks with a shakey Louisiana accent but proves to be as sharp as any Holmes or Poirot. As for suspects there are many as current scenes and flashbacks make clear.
Was it the author’s daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), his son (Michael Shannon), his son-in-law (Don Johnson), daughter-in-law (Toni Collette), grandson (Chris Evans) or maybe his immigrant nurse (Ana de Armas)? The script and direction are by Rian Johnson, who is between Star Wars projects right now but has dabbled in off-beat crime stories before. He deftly points the finger at each one of them in turn, keeps us guessing all the way and finally delivers a perfectly logical and satisfying solution. And he does it with bright dialogue and clever wit. This film is a treat. (5th Avenue, Scotiabank, Marine Gateway and suburban theatres) 4 out of 5
DARK WATERS: It’s rare, infrequent but worth celebrating when the movies take on a subject as weighty as this. Big corporation poisons the environment and tries to hide it. In this case it was DuPont with the chemical listed as PFOA which it uses in one of its signature products, Teflon. It makes your frying pans non-stick but dumped into a groundwater system causes birth defects and a variety of diseases in human beings and according to a farmer living near one of the company’s plants sickens and kills cows. All this came out when the farmer from West Virginia recruited an Ohio lawyer, played by Mark Ruffalo, to come down see for himself.
The film is based on a magazine article about the case entitled “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” but isn’t ever as dramatic as that. It shows the 16 years of hard work behind it, the research, the roomful of documents to go through, the discovery that the chemical was re-named C-8 to disguise it. Detective work by paper isn’t photogenic. But there was drama in the lawyer’s own office which usually defended chemical companies in court and where the boss (played by Tim Robbins) wasn’t wanting to shift sides. Victor Garber as a Dupont executive was a roadblock too. (Anne Hathaway didn’t have much to do except be the lawyer’s supportive wife). But the persistence, the shocking facts and the details of digging them out make this an involving story and Todd Haynes, the director, keeps it moving along well enough. (International Village) 3 ½ out of 5
QUEEN & SLIM: This one was clearly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, so expect serious themes and content. But it's also a very cinematic road trip and an avoid-the-law flight for freedom. So it’s also an exciting, tense and entertaining movie with two attractive stars. One we know. Daniel Kaluuya impressed in Get Out and in Widows. Jodie Turner-Smith, lesser-known but with TV background, is the decisive but anxious Queen to his Slim. She’s a lawyer who’s had a bad day and is in for a worse night. After a dinner date, they’re pulled over by a white cop who bullies them. She suffers a gun shot; Slim grabs the gun and kills the cop and off they go.
The rest of the film is a series of incidents on their flight south and expertly modulated suspense interrupted by moments of calm. They hear on the radio that they’re cop killers. Out of gas, they get a ride with a pickup driver who turns out to be the local sheriff. They find sanctuary of a sort in a rhythm and blues roadhouse. Waiting for a car repair, they stroll a lakeside and ponder their lives. Their idea, on her suggestion, is to get to Florida and from there to Cuba but every stop on the way reveals another side of America to them and the absolute necessity of the black community to stick together in solidarity. The film makes points like that without stating them directly but with incidents that illustrate them. The two even become folk heros when a video of the original incident caught on a dashcam goes viral. Not everything works—a sex scene intercut with a riot scene, for instance—but generally the message and the emotions hit. The director, Melina Matsoukas, is fresh to this (from Beyonce videos) and the screenplay is by Emmy winner Lena Waithe. That’s another timely aspect here: two black women telling a black story. (International Village and two suburban theatres) 3 ½ out of 5
STAND! A key piece of Canadian history that we should all know more about gets a worthy, not super effective recounting in this film. This is the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, a key event in the advance of workers’ rights, the union movement and political organizations. But telling it in a Romeo and Juliet-like narrative and as a musical doesn’t really fit. It’s no Pajama Game; the songs aren’t rousing and memorable and the story doesn’t bounce. It does tell what happened though and is based on a stage show co-written by Winnipeg native Danny Schur. So the facts are there but the spectacle is a bit like a staged pageant.
The war was over, soldiers were back home and there weren’t jobs for them. Some griped that immigrants were doing their work and for less pay. The film is loaded with rhetoric like “foreign bastards” and “bohunks and their Jew friends” and statements of purpose (“The more we do nothing, the more nothing changes.”) There’s a workers meeting, a vote for a general strike, a walkout by some 30,000 and, in response, a citizens committee formed by the bosses and elite of the city and leaning on Ottawa to help. On “Black Saturday” the police charge into a striker’s rally with guns and clubs. That and the politics leading up to it are well-presented but framing it all around a young romance between Marshall Williams as a Ukrainian steelworker and Laura Slade Wiggins as a young Jewish suffragette, feels artificial. Robert Adetuyi, a Canadian with Hollywood experience, directed and a union, which helped finance the film, is working to get it shown in schools. (International Village and Riverport) 2 ½ out of 5
HONEY BOY: It’s not everybody who gets to work out his demons by portraying their source. For Shia LaBoeuf, movie actor, performance artist, tabloid newspaper subject for his misbehavior, that means portraying his own father in this film. He was a rodeo clown, a hovering parent when Shia was a child performer at Disney and an erratic sometimes abusive father when they lived in a cheap motel after mom had left. Recalling that relationship, in note form originally, was a rehab assignment after Shia was arrested for drunken behavior in 2017. Sound grim? Actually it’s quite fascinating and touching, as well as raw.
Shia not only gets to portray his father, but also gets to interact with two fellows playing himself, or at least the visions of himself that he wrote. Noah Jupe is a bright young actor from England good at both abiding and arguing back at dad in that dingy motel. Lucas Hedges plays him at age twenty, a fidgety extrovert who comes closer to understanding and accepting him. Taken together, the effect is both painful and healing, pretty well what you’d expect out of a rehab exercise. The names have all been changed for whatever reason but the content seems to be authentic. Shia never puts down his father and Alma Har’el directs from a documentary background. (Scotiabank) 3 out of 5