It has only been open for a few months, but I am really beginning to like the Vancity Theatre at the Vancouver Int’l Film Centre.
The schedules there are a tad erratic, with films frequently paired together that have nothing to do with each other — tonight’s double-bill, if you can call it that, was an excellent adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967) and a documentary on same-sex marriage and pot legalization called Escape to Canada (2005) — but I’ve caught a number of interesting items there the last few weeks, including all of last year’s Oscar-nominated live-action and animated short films, the editing documentary Edge Codes (2004), and a couple of mildly risqué 1930s flicks directed by Alfred E. Green, namely The Dark Horse (1932), a hilarious political satire co-starring Bette Davis, and Baby Face (1933), which stars Barbra Stanwyck as a poor gal who sleeps her way to the top; one of her conquests is a young John Wayne.
Tonight, I picked up their newest program, and noticed that they will be running a retrospective of Terrence Malick’s films — including the shorter, 135-minute version of The New World which I have not yet seen — in mid-July. So it looks like I still have a chance to see it on the big screen after all! And while I didn’t care for The Thin Red Line all that much both times I saw it circa 1998, it will be good to give Badlands (1973) and especially Days of Heaven (1978) another look — and on the big screen, for once.
Other upcoming items that are worth noting, some of which I have seen before, and a few of which I have not:
- David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) — June 9-15
- Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980), filmed in Vancouver — June 12-13
- Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) and Guy Maddin’s My Dad is 100 Years Old (2005), starring Rossellini’s daughter Isabella — June 26-29
- Blaine Thurier’s Male Fantasy (2004), featuring a cameo by my sister Monica — August 6
- Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) — August 11-17
And, of course, many other items as well. An exhaustive list of the upcoming films for the next couple months is available here.
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