Films to Watch at Vancouver's VIFF Centre in November

What films are you excited for audiences to see this month?

I feel like the beginning of November is overshadowed by the US elections, and it was challenging to know quite what to do with that, but I’m excited to share two adaptations from the work of Richard Condon, an American novelist who specialized in these conspiracy thrillers that are really black comic satires, but which cut deep, and which he was writing in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

I think you can see the roots of dysfunction in the American system reflected in his work, the whole paranoid conspiracy mindset is deeply embedded because of what happened to JFK and Martin Luther King, and this really fueled his work. So we have the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, which was filmed in the early 60s and released, in fact, within a month of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The film is about brainwashing and the manipulation of the American psyche, and about a conspiracy to get a vice president in position for a potential assassination, for a kind of backstage coup. This was remade by Jonathan Demme in 2004 with Denzel Washington and Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep, and it’s a fantastic film. Remakes often don’t get the respect of the original film when they come out, and then 10 or 20 years later, suddenly they get their appreciation. I feel like the time is right for this movie.

That’s playing alongside Winter Kills, which is this crazy riff on the Kennedy assassinations, with Jeff Bridges playing the younger brother of an assassinated president, trying to find out who ordered the killing. It’s an extraordinary film with one of the most impressive and improbable casts you’ll ever see. It’s very funny. It’s a first feature by William Reichert, but kind of anticipates where Oliver Stone took his movie JFK, in terms of the theory, but goes even deeper and feels very relevant to today, unfortunately.

Our annual festival recently finished on October 6. Are there any new films that played in the festival that people will have a chance to see?

Some of the bigger, most popular films that played at the recent festival are coming back. We have Andrea Arnold’s Bird, and then the week after that, All We Imagine as Light, and then the wordless animation film Flow. All those films were massively well liked by our by our audience at the festival. So we’re really happy to have them come back and hopefully expand their audience.

We’re launching a new Film Studies from Monday, November 11 – what can people expect from this series?

Hollywood Through the Looking Glass is a five-week series presented by local author and film scholar Donald Brackett. Each of the films in that series will come with a 25-minute introductory lecture and a chance to do a talkback afterwards.

Each film takes us through a different decade of Hollywood, on Hollywood. So you have What Price Hollywood? which is a very early talkie, and which was subsequently remade as A Star is Born. Then we have Sullivan’s Travels, a great Preston Sturges satire from the early 1940s. From the 50s, we have The Bad and the Beautiful by Vincente Minnelli, Liza Minnelli’s dad.

And then we skip forward a little bit to The Day of the Locust by John Schlesinger, an adaptation of the seminal Hollywood novel by Nathanael West. The series comes right up to date, but also kind of goes full circle, with Damien Chazelle movie Babylon, which came out just two years ago, but which is set at the end of the silent era and the beginning of the talkies.

What VIFF Live events are happening in November?

We’ve got lots of live events — these are the things I’m most excited about in November, there’s pretty much one every week.

We have Anju Singh coming back to do a live score of the Japanese expressionist film A Page of Madness. I hesitate to call it a horror movie, but it’s a crazy, almost impenetrable film set in an insane asylum. We presented this here at the VIFF Centre in the spring and it sold out — this is the first time we’ve ever invited somebody to come back and do an encore performance. I was so impressed with the musical virtuosity that she brought to this show. She took the original score that she performed for the first time then and has now recorded it as an album, so this is doubling as the album launch. It’s going to be remarkable.

On November 16, we have somebody else who has performed here before, but she’s going to do a whole different set. Trumpet player Feven Kidane performed during Black History Month for us with a documentary about Max Roach, and she absolutely blew the roof off. Of all the live musical events we’ve done over the last couple of years, and we’ve done quite a few, it was probably the most memorable. I’m so excited to have her coming back. She’s doing an original set with a quartet of local jazz musicians of music inspired by the movie Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat, which played at the film festival. In my opinion, it’s one of the best documentaries of the year, and one of the best films we showed in VIFF. We’re only able to show the film once at this time because it’s not released in Canada until January of next year.

The week after that, on November 24, Vince Mai, another trumpet player, is bringing a quartet and a singer to pay tribute to Chet Baker, and we’re showing the newly restored Bruce Weber documentary from 1988, Let’s Get Lost.

Chet Baker was in the 1950s thought of as a potential rival to Miles Davis. He also happened to look like James Dean, and it felt like the sky was the limit for this guy, but he became a heroin addict and didn’t have the career that he might have had. But in the late 80s he was befriended by Bruce Webber, who is a famous photographer, and Webber ended up filming him on what would turn out to be his last tour before he died. While Chet Baker could not replicate the power and vigor of his playing in the 1950s, he didn’t try to – he brought a whole new quality to his singing and his trumpet playing, which is quite genuine and authentically heartbreaking. No less a person than Bjork has talked about how this movie completely blew her away and has continued to be an inspiration to her.

Thanks so much, Tom!

Tom Charity has been the year-round programmer at the VIFF Centre since 2009. He is the author of the critical biography John Cassavetes: Lifeworks, and has written or cowritten several other film books. A former film editor and critic for Time Out London magazine and CNN.com, he has also written for The Times and Sunday Times, the Vancouver Sun, and many other publications. He contributes to Cinema Scope and Sight & Sound Magazine on a regular basis.