Movies for Breakfast


Volver (Spain)	Electric Chairs (Canada)	Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (UK/USA)	Shortbus (USA)

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 15

FIN

It's over. Thank God! Just kidding. Sort of. The reason there have not been daily posts here, as I had (naively) intended at the outset, is that I've been at the Empire Granville 7 Theatre all day, every day (with one exception) since the Vancouver International Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, September 28. Upon discovering to my amazement that I cannot be in two places at once, I sided with the films and abandoned the website momentarily.

For the list of 2006 VIFF winners, please click here. I was thrilled that Germany's multiple award-winning The Lives of Others won The People's Choice Award for Most Popular International Film. (You may recall that I bawled my eyes out in the car on my way home from that screening and scared my apartment manager.) Never have I heard so many moviegoers, waiting in line-ups and milling about in theatre lobbies, repeatedly murmuring about one picture until their acclaim turned into a roar of approval. From what I have been able to find out thus far, The Lives of Others has been picked up by Canadian distributor Mongrel Media, therefore, it will likely be coming to a cinema near you in the future. I'd like to think the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will recognize this agonizing suspense thriller about Stasi-surveillance-with-a-twist by nominating it in the Foreign Language Film category come Oscar time. You can read the The Hollywood Reporter review of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature (can you believe it?!) by clicking here.

MFB's
TOP 10 VIFF FILMS*

1. The Lives of Others (Germany)
2. Thin (USA)
3. Encounter Point (Israel/USA)
4. Offside (Iran)
5. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (Austria/UK/Netherlands)
6. The Queen (UK)
7. The Page Turner (France)
8. Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (UK/USA)
9. Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple (USA)
10. Love For Share (Indonesia)

*Clearly, I didn't manage to see every film at the festival. Based on other people's recommendations, the following movies were also favourites: Vitus, The Last King of Scotland, The Host, Away From Her, Fido, Catch a Fire, Congorama, Cats of Mirikatani, The Line of Beauty, and To Play and To Fight.

Hell hath no fury... (The Page Turner)

"The message of this film is that it's never too
late. Don't look at anyone with age barriers."
-- Dan Ireland, director, Mrs. Palfrey at
the Claremont, starring Joan Plowright

MFB's Festival Highlights
(apart from the films)

1. The Vancouver International Film Festival volunteers. What a dedicated, friendly army of movie devotees. From helping my 80-year-old father figure out where he was to meet me to see The Page Turner (I was watching A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints at the time), to patiently explaining the line-up drill, to going out of their way to locate overjoyed buyers for my tix to the South Korean monster movie The Host, the VIFF volunteers were superb ambassadors for the festival and Vancouver. How they kept their cool I'll never know. They're truly professional. And they looked awfully cute in their kilts and pajamas on the fest's Scottish and PJ Days.

2. Meeting so many women aged 70+ years old. Sans husbands and children, and retired from their careers but not their lives, numerous Lower Mainland elder women descended on the slate of international films. They made the line-up conversations more interesting and shared insight on the films they'd seen in a more informed fashion than many of the younger generation did. I sure hope I'm 'with it' enough at 80 to hop on SkyTrain and go downtown to see a film about India's eunuchs.

As enjoyable to meet, for other reasons, were actors Steven Culp (Thirteen Days; Desperate Housewives) at Brightlight Pictures' pre-festival party at Cin Cin Ristorante and Larry Thomas (Seinfeld's 'Soup Nazi') at the VIFF kick-off party at the Sheraton Wall Centre. Nice guys both.

3. The Vancity Theatre. Compared to the Empire Granville 7, with its backbreaking seats and dreadful air quality, the VIFF's classy new home theatre is heaven. The Seymour Street venue's plush orange stadium seats, sense of calm, and classical background music contributed to a lovely filmgoing experience and soothed away the nervous tension generated by the frumpy Granville Street locale.

4. Sitting quietly in my aisle seat before a screening of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, the film's director Dan Ireland, who had to leave to catch a plane, walked towards me, smiled, and squeezed my shoulder. We've never met. Time will tell if he transferred some good luck.

5. Watching the gritty, New York-based true story A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and realizing that the Rolling Stone magazine review was correct when it described 26-year-old teen flick heartthrob Channing Tatum as being like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. As the troubled, battered, and violent Antonio, Tatum gave a performance worthy of an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. We'll see.

MFB's Festival Downers

1. The air conditioning. The icy gusts blasting through many of the theatres were so cold that audiences (with the exception of the woman I met who confided she'd just had a hot flash) had to leave their jackets on throughout the screenings. Even so swaddled, our dry eyes, plugged sinuses, and general discomfort prevailed.

2. The pass holder ticket policy. The requirement that pass holders be at the cinema by 9:00 am every morning in order to be sure to get their most-wanted tickets for the day, even if other, more pressing obligations (like a doctor's appointment or three hours of laundry) meant that the first movie they could see wasn't until 1:00 pm, just sucked.

3. Who decided that there would be only 4 VIFF promos preceding the hundreds of film on offer? If I had to sit through that meat cutter explaining Diego's whereabouts ("marry the royalty family!") one more time, I might have lost my mind. It didn't help that, in the festival's dying days, some loudmouths thought it would be a giggle to turn the promos into a mini Rocky Horror Picture Show by hollering out the dialogue. Sigh.

4. No daytime screenings of The Queen. The VIFF cancelled the daytime screenings of this much buzzed-about flick, meaning people who'd purchased Matinee Day passes were SOL unless they bought an evening ticket. Not the end of the world, admittedly, but an annoying mystery.

5. The creeps. It's very disconcerting to be sitting in a dark theatre and become aware that the unaccompanied guy next to you is staring at you instead of the film. I watched as one perv kept switching seats so he could sit beside various unaccompanied women and spend a while staring at them before moving on to the next. Another creep in front of me chuckled throughout a screening of Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple, looking swiftly around after each outburst in case his psychopathic mental illness was making itself apparent. Well it was, buddy. Get help. There was nothing remotely amusing about that documentary. Last but not least, there was the perfectly normal-looking man who, while I was imprisoned in the passholders' ticket line-up, insisted on describing in detail and with no encouragement, the most fabulous cinematic sex scene he'd seen the other day. Talk about needing a shower afterwards.

Honourable mention: The umpteen, close-up, gratuitous nipple shots in Carl Bessai's Unnatural & Accidental. I learned more about the murder victims' anatomy than their lives in this film. Isn't the murderer of these women supposed to be the disrespectful one? That said, the content didn't faze Women in Film & Video Vancouver, who bestowed their Artistic Merit Award to this tragic, fact-based story about the Vancouver native women who were killed by alcohol poisoning. Guess I fail to appreciate art.

COMING SOON: MORE VIFF PHOTOS!

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5

DAY 8

PLAYING HURT
If you've missed finding a new post here, I apologize. I've been in agony the last few days, and had to skip a couple of films, the Stanley Park Ghost Train, and Talelight Films's cocktail party at Opus because sitting down (especially in the Empire Granville 7's thinly padded, cramped seats) was aggravating the mysterious ailment. But like a happy Hollywood ending (as opposed to all those tragic film fest movie endings), an emergency visit to The Adjuster in North Burnaby fixed what turned out to be a locked neck and a wonky rib. Konstantin is relieved the claws have been retracted. Three films I did manage to watch while muffling my screams were The Queen (at a Fifth Avenue press screening; the VIFF cancelled the daytime screenings I could access with the weekday matinee pass I'd purchased), American Zeitgeist: Crisis and Conscience in an Age of Terror, and Lights in the Dusk. The best of these? The Queen. Look for more on those three, plus Colour it Kubrick, Obaba, and Candy, aka Heath Ledger as a drug addict, tomorrow night

MONDAY, OCTOBER 2

DAY 5

CRAMMING TWO DAYS INTO ONE

A Pervert's Guide to Cinema was a delight, as much for the movie as for the cinema 5 VIFF volunteer who addressed the audience beforehand: “Thank you, perverts…and
you know who you are." The two-and-a-half hour, Austria/Netherlands/ UK documentary presents the astoundingly enthusiastic Slavoj Zizek (pictured right), a philosopher and psychoanalyst, enthusiastically deconstructing movies according to Freudian theory. Flicks referenced include The Matrix ("I want a third pill!"), Vertigo , Psycho , Kieslowskis' Blue , and works by the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Zizek 's best analysis? Why the birds in Hitchcock's famous thriller first attacked Tippi Hedren 's character, then pecked the bejesus out of the entire town: "Explosive outbursts of maternal superego... raw incestuous energy." This is a must-see for cinephiles!

Hark, all single men. Are you horrified by your girlfriend's persistently romantic notions of marriage? Take your enthusiastic sweetie to a screening of the Indonesian film Love For Share. If these three, intertwining tales of polygamy and their cast of lazy, egomaniacal men, female doormats, and gold-digging whores don't sour her on becoming your, or anybody less than George Clooney's, bride, nothing will. In less fortunate parts of the world, as we see in this pessimistic film, marriage is not, in fact, a union of love but a convenience. It puts a roof over a financially destitute chick's head, keeps the population exploding by positioning women as brood mares, and lets female folk relocate to cities they've dreamed of but would not see unless some hideous, syphilitic troll who lived there honoured them with his perfunctory sexual attentions. Many Canadian women, myself included, are spoiled Westerners who can afford to idealize marriage in terms of love and finding a soul mate, but trust me: Love For Share will change most women's feelings about marriage from holy matrimony to holy shit.

Thank god they didn't show the castration. For a minute there in Between the Lines: India's Third Gender, I grabbed my purse strap and got ready to bolt rather than witness an unanesthetized Bobbit scene. This disturbing film follows photographer Anita Khemka as she gets to know the hirjas--male born prostitutes who refer to themselves as 'she' and relish the idea of having their penises lopped off (the younger they do it, the softer and more hairless their skin) It's sad, even frightening how the hirjas live on the fringes of society, literally taking it up the butt from the male population and, in turn, putting curses on the Indian people if they don't cough up sufficient money into their forever outstretched, garishly painted fingers.

Here we come, walkin'
down the street
we get the funniest looks from, ev'ryone we meet

Hey, hey, we're the hirjas
and people keep us running to ground
but we're too busy begging to put anybody down.

During the 60-minute Iranian film 13 1/2, the projector broke down three times, the row of people behind me tsked and talked loudly throughout, and an audience member harangued the director during a post-show Q&A. I smell an old-world Iranian conspiracy--what else were these spanners in the works if not attempts by someone to shut down this debut showing of a film about modern-thinking Iranian women

The worst filmgoing experience I've had so far at this year's festival was Flesh. I'd thought the movie was going to cleverly examine the parallels between how society views women and meat. But there were one too many murdered deer and doomed calves for my liking. Seeing a spread-eagled elk about to be skinned and torn apart by hunters attending a women's outdoor clinic was the last straw. I
walked out. That means I never go to hear Hustler magazine's Larry Flynt spout off, as promised in the program notes. Pity.

Volver, despite being the opening film, was irksome for being immensely self-conscious. It's never been appealing, for me, to revel in uneventful sequences, like the one here showing 3 grunting Spanish women grappling with a fridge on a moving dolly. Why is that funny? Is it because women look stupid trying to do something other than applying lipstick? Is it some Spanish, gender-bending homage to The Three Stooges? How come the audience was howling? Am I missing the integral, art-appreciation part of my brain?! Director Pedro Almodovar also enjoys shooting as if he were a bug on the kitchen ceiling. What this means is that when Penelope Cruz's character is washing dishes, we can stare down, waaay down, into the famous cleavage that has nestled both Matthew McConaughey and Tom Cruise. "Are you all right, dad?" enquired the guy beside me of his elderly father who, presumably, was about to have a heart attack at the sight of such ample breast fat. Turns out dad was fine. Not me. It's unnerving sitting in a dark theatre knowing that on either side of you are complete strangers' throbbing erections.

WHAT: THE GALA OPENING

WHERE: Sheraton Wall Centre

WHEN: Thursday, September 28, 2006

WHY: To Celebrate the Launch of the 25th Year of VIFF

WHO: Everyone! (See below)


Randy Bachman and Konstantin taking care of business. To our surprise, Bachman had no idea that "Let It Ride" is currently featured in a bitchin' gridiron sequence in Mark Wahlberg's popular football flick Invincible.	The CBC's Gloria Macarenko with equally jovial cameraman Mike Varga. Konstantin admires the local news anchor as much for her Ukrainian surname as for her on-air professionalism.	The opening night audience settles in to watch Pedro Almodovar's Volver, starring Penelope Cruz. The film won Best Screenplay at Cannes, its entire female cast honoured with the Best Actress award. Someone I spoke with said it was a bit misogynistic. I'm seeing it Sunday and will post my opinion here. Did you ever doubt it?

Steph Song, the woman voted "#1 Sexiest Woman in the World 2006" by FHM readers in Asia, stars in Douglas Coupland's VIFF film Everything's Gone Green. Around her, it's probably with envy.	Broadcaster and documentarian Avi Lewis, son of politician Stephen Lewis and husband of "No Logo" author Naomi Klein, charms yet another soul. He was at the fest introducing the award-winning documentary Encounter Point.	Brooklyn-born, LA-based Larry "The Soup Nazi" Thomas (real guy at left) is in Vancouver working on the film Postal. Director Uwe Boll is possibly even funnier than Seinfeld writer Larry David, Thomas told us. He also said he's often mistaken for Bruce Weitz from Hill Street Blues.


VIFF's Terry McEvoy and Diane Kunic-Grandjean. McEvoy told us that in programming the Canadian Images section of the festival, he watched 600 films over two-and-a-half months. His favourite? Greg Hamilton's Mystic Ball, which McEvoy called "magic."	Moroccan born, Madrid-based Heaven's Doors filmmaker Swel Noury is mesmerized by my new business cards. "I don't want to be interviewed if you haven't seen my film," he warned me, crossly, even though I hadn't asked for an interview. I totally agreed, so we got along fine.	Beth getting silly with Wayne Robert, General Manager of Knowledge Network. Hey, we used to work together and now only see one another when we're dressed up at awards shows and the like. It's not like I'm sucking up to get a job introducing By the Book.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

DAY TWO

MOVIES SEEN: The Lives of Others; Sound of the Soul: The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music

The most powerhouse film in the entire festival just might be the one with which I launched my 2006 VIFF experience. Grown men and women who attended today's 11:00 am screening of Germany's The Lives of Others [Das Leben der Anderen] were wiping their red, swollen eyes and tear-soaked faces after absorbing the riveting, beautifully shot film and barely withstanding the succession of emotional wallops at its conclusion. And this is writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's debut feature!

According to the VIFF festival guide, the unflinching examination of life in East Berlin under the Stasi won seven Lolas (the German equivalent of the Oscar), including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Actor for Ulrich Mühe (who, incidentally, is a dead ringer for Colm Feore). Henckel von Donnersmarck has an uncanny ability to keep us fascinated throughout, and then tie everything up so tightly and profoundly at the end that we weep with joy and sorrow. I cried all the way home in the car, scaring my landlord when he saw my expression. There are two screenings of Lives left, on October 5 and 9. It's a sure thing.

Fortunately, I'd picked a lighter flick to see next: Sound of the Soul: The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music. In a nutshell, Stephen Olsson's flick is a hopeful, feel good documentary that celebrates, through music, the religious tolerance in Morocco's stunning, ancient city of Fez. The impact of The Lives of Others was such, however, that I kept thinking about Germany before the wall came down.

Day's Highlight: The Lives of Others, especially its conclusion.

Day's Lowlight: When a young woman walking in front of me through the mall on the way to the Vancouver Centre Parkade let the door slam in my face, twice, instead of holding it for me as civilized people are wont to do. When I enquired of her highness why she was doing that, she screamed, "Shut up!!!" and teetered away.

Off-screen star of the day: The VIFF volunteer at outside the Empire Granville 7 Theatre who happily dashed to the box office to find out something for me, even though I didn't want her to go to any trouble.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When you have activist/TV personality Avi Lewis, Georgia Straight publisher Dan McLeod, the CBC's Gloria Macarenko, BTO's Randy Bachman, Vancouver directors Sandy Wilson (My American Cousin) and Carl Bessai (Emile), a gyrating acrobat dangling from the ceiling, and the Soup Nazi all in the same room, that's a party. And that VIFF kick-off party is why I'm now slightly hungover, reeling, and so late for heading downtown to catch the German thriller Lives of Others that I've no time to post anything but this blurb yet. Please check back tonight for photo coverage of last night's Gala Celebration at the Sheraton Wall Centre, and for gossip about today's screenings!

Posted by BMcArthur @ 8:59 am

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

DAY ONE!

And so it begins. Welcome to our coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival. Tonight, moviesforbreakfast.com will be on hand to snap the movie makers and shakers as they arrive at the Empire Granville 7 Theatre for the gala opening presentation of Pedro Almodovar's stunningly popular Volver, starring Penelope Cruz. Later, we'll trek over to the Sheraton Wall Centre to get some shots at the gala party. We'll post as many pictures as we can tonight. In the meantime, we are trembling with anticipation, in particular because one of Canada's finest actors, Callum Keith Rennie, might, just might, be there in support of his fest film Unnatural and Accidental. And how's this for a fabulous rumour: Renee Zellweger is said to have rekindled her romance with super movie star George Clooney, and Renee is currently in Vancouver shooting her new film Case 39. What a red carpet entrance those Oscar winners would make! Plus, they're both extremely personable and very, very funny people. Those are the stars we like to promote here at MFB. Please check back here later tonight for photos.... of Renee, George or at very least their fine colleagues in the acting world.

In the meantime, we hope you enjoy what's posted here so far. See you at the festival!

Posted by BMcArthur @ 8:00 am

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

DAY - 1

THE RUSSIANS ARE NOT ONLY COMING, I'M LIVING WITH ONE

The Russian kid whose journey
brought a Canadian couple together
(from Koktebel)

The VIFF post is small today because it's MFB photographer Konstantin and my 3rd anniversary and we've been out celebrating. Warning: the following post is all about us, with movies thrown in as supporting players. For photos of the stars, please skip to the posting from Tuesday (below this one).

So yes, the Vancouver International Film Festival was the mighty force that compelled this site's publishers to shun singledom and head out on that first date all that time ago. I routinely see Russian flicks during the fest. As it happened, Konstantin's Russian. So when I made his acquaintance a few days shy of the film fest kickoff in 2003, I took the opportunity to ask him which one or two Russian films, out of a few that were screening that year, I would be wise to see. He hadn't a clue. But the exchange led to our meeting up at the now dearly departed Vogue Theatre to see Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky 's Koktebel together. The rest is history--Canadian and Russian.

For our 1st anniversary, we rushed out to catch Alexei Gherman Jr.'s The Last Train. Alas, it skipped the track. Despite usually being good sports, we skedaddled out of there part-way through because of all the coughing onscreen. Instead of a juicy monologue, virtually every actor had been granted an obnoxious, wheezing-up-a-lung sequence of some duration. That's what happens when the characters have diphtheria. Anyway, it wasn't a film worthy of a joyful celebration. Yeah, yeah, I imagine if it was really comedy I'd wanted, I'd be dating an Englishman. Still, in keeping with tradition, we have again bought tickets to see a Russian movie at the VIFF. This year, a screening of Garpastum will mark our third milestone. The only thing off-putting is that Garpastum's by the same director that should have spiked his earlier cast's vodka shots with Buckley's. It was either that or the distressing Blockade [right]. And at least there's soccer involved in the former. Tomorrow Night: moviesforbreakfast.com goes to the VIFF Opening Gala!

Posted by BMcArthur @ 11:25 pm

Garpastum: It better be good.

The Last Train: It wasn't

Blockade: A million dead, with shots of mass graves and abandoned buildings. Not exactly a romantic flick befitting a 3rd anniversary.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

DAY - 2

BRIGHTLIGHT, BIG CITY, BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

Good heavens. Where do you start when it comes to writing about Brightlight Pictures' 4th annual pre-film fest bash at Robson Street's CinCin Ristorante? On this balmy summer evening, Terry David Mulligan, emceeing the event for Star TV, was all smiles and positive energy. Not everyone was so chipper. CBC's Steve Burgess told me that the man in charge of the Esprit store next door to the party was steamed at event coordinator Rory Richards for allegedly driving people away from his business thanks to the red carpet that someone dared to roll past his store's front door. Good grief. Somebody tell the furious proprietor that there are establishments willing to pay big bucks to lure people like Ian Tracey, Sonja Bennett, Joely Collins, Kaj-Erik Eriksen, Steph Song, Benjamin Ratner, Adrian Holmes, Katee Sackhoff, Nicholas Lea, and their wallets to the front door.

So there we were, Konstantin and I, slung with cameras outside The Angry Man's Business, jostling for pix among media folks like Burgess, Global's Erin Cebula (for ET Canada) , and CityTV's Dawn Chubai. More than once we, okay I, toppled over a stanchion and almost onto the red carpet in the act of craning my neck to snap photos that didn't have some other eager photographer's lens in the picture. Jessica Alba didn't show up after all, but plenty of other stars did. Because it's after 10:00 pm and I have a very early call for work tomorrow morning at another job, I'll wrap this up quickly tonight. Please check back later for much, much more on the evening!

Best Smelling (or is that scented?) Actor: Corbin Bernsen, who, as he graciously passed by in CinCin's stairwell, enveloped me in an intoxicating cloud of some very expensive cologne that clings gently to my flesh even as I type this. Ay-yi-yi, I finally get Arnie Becker. Then, just as graciously, the star of the new, Vancouver-lensed TV series Psych deigned to let me, and other party hopper CTV news anchor Coleen Christie, pick up his scent again when he exited the party before I'd so much as reached the entrance.

An Excellent Reason to Make Basic Instinct -- The Sequel Where They Discover a Younger Sister to Catherine Tramell: This would star the gorgeous, poised, sharply-featured Kristanna Loken of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and BloodRayne. She's a doppelganger for 'the young' Sharon Stone all those ageist people keep pining for. With her cleavage and white sneakered feet flashing the media press line, Loken was the night's only red carpet arrival who elicited screams when she alighted from her limo.

Proof that Class Can Co-Exist with Superb Acting: He wasn't on the red carpet, but there's no way we'd miss spotting busy actor Steven Culp, formerly Rex Van de Camp of Desperate Housewives, as he strode alone towards the party, away from the lights. The SAG Award-winning thespian is better known in our home as Bobby Kennedy, having played JFK's little brother twice: in Thirteen Days (a superb film set during the Cuban Missile Crisis) and the TV movie Norma Jean & Marilyn. When I met Culp in the heated crush of CinCin later, I asked if he were jealous that he wasn't cast in Emilio Estevez's upcoming film Bobby, which tells the story of US Senator Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. "No," he replied, explaining that "Bobby's not actually in the movie. It's more like Grand Hotel, where you witness the events leading up to it [the assassination]."

Asked what he's working on now, Culp told moviesforbreakfast.com that he's in Vancouver shooting the TV series The Traveler. He also took the time to ask what I was working on. Suffice it to say that Culp is one of the most gentlemanly actors I've met to this day. I'd post a photo, but in one of them my eyes are closed and in another, Culp's eyes are closed. I could Photoshop them together and pretend the picture was taken as we sat together at a screening of All the King's Men. But that wouldn't be very nice.

Politician Sighting: Lorne Mayencourt. "After you interviewed me," he said (see moviesforbreakfast.com's August Q&A), "I went out to see Devil Wears Prada again and it was great!"

Most Joyous Actor: It's a tie! In this corner, there's Phil Collins' daughter Joely Collins (Almost Heaven), whose infectious laugh and mile-wide smile made everyone around her feel like they were suffering from clinical depression. And in that corner, there's the radiant Sonja Bennett (Fido), who appeared illuminated from within. So far, she's Konstantin's favourite of the fest. I'm sticking with Culp.

Busiest Young Actor: BC's 11-year-old Jodelle Ferland of the recent Lifetime movie Amber's Story, is currently starring in the VIFF short film Swimming Lessons. She's also working with Renee Zellweger in the locally-shot Case 39. Offscreen, Ferland starred on the red carpet tonight, in a pretty pink confection of a gown and matching flip-flops. It always blows my mind how poised child actors can be and Ferland is no exception. Don't go changin'.

Posted by BMcArthur @ 11:00 pm

The best-smelling actor around: Psych's Corbin Bernsen.

Kristanna Loken: she's got the pose and she's got the clothes.

Joely Collins laughs and the world laughs with her.

Fido's Sonja Bennett, flanked by Jennifer Clement and Rob LaBelle.

Pretty in Pink: Jodelle Ferland (Swimming Lessons)

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

DAY - 3

THE FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN!

Welcome to www.moviesforbreakfast.com's Vancouver International Film Festival coverage! We've bought our pass and tickets, and purchased an oversize purse that will hold camera, notepad, festival program, and snacks to plug the hole between screenings. Over the next two weeks, this Vancouver-based space will be home to our outpouring of mini-film reviews, festival party and movie photos, film fest news, gossip, ramblings, and general, glorious movie mayhem. We'll go on the record right here as saying we believe some things are still sacred. Ergo, there will be no insider dirt on nocturnal film folk couplings occurring after debauched gala celebrations. We're all about the flicks. (Unless, of course, it's a REALLY HUGE star and we hear about it first.)

That's us pictured on the right side of this page, shamelessly holding the photo spot until we can post new, VIFF-related images of far more intriguing and celebrated individuals. That will be likely be tomorrow night. That's when we hit the red carpet outside Cin Cin restaurant on Robson Street to photograph the arrivals at Brightlight Pictures' annual pre-fest party. Jessica Alba, in town shooting Fantastic Four Two, is on the guest list and will be there shooting schedule permitting. Chris Evans, Joely Collins, Benjamin Ratner, Ian Tracey, Carl Bessai, and Nicholas Lea are also names being bandied about. Stay tuned.

Wherever you are in the world, I hope you enjoy our coverage. So, to the movies! They educate us about one another and provide a deliriously welcome alternative to the hard knocks of real life. And once in a while, a really, really great monster movie comes along.

Posted by BMcArthur @ 9:00 pm

Beth, Writer

Konstantin, Photographer


Candy (Australia)	The Cats of Mirikitani (USA)	Flesh (Canada)	Offside (Iran)