Inspirational Figures

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Keeya King, an actor you’ve probably seen more often than you realize, especially if you’re a genre fan. She’s had key roles in Van Helsing and Yellowjackets, popped up in Jigsaw and The Handmaid’s Tale and Batwoman, and just joined the cast of Gen V, Amazon’s spinoff of The Boys. And she stars in a new thriller, Guess Who, that’s now streaming on Tubi in the US and Hollywood Suite in Canada.

And Keeya brought a fun one onto the show: Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s first solo directorial venture and the film that let Saoirse Ronan have a little fun for a change, playing a nervy Sacramento teenager whose decision to reinvent herself as a free spirit in her senior year starts a series of fairly silly events — and further complicates her relationship with her parents, played by Laurie Metcalf and Tracey Letts. It’s a heartfelt coming-of-age comedy with terrific performances and a thoughtful point of view. So there’s a lot to dig into, and Keeya was more than up for it.

Give us a listen! Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and put it on in the background while you work a wooden spoon under your cast to scratch your itchy arm.

And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where I’ve just written about Shout! Studios’ new 4K restoration of Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath and Arrow Video’s oddly charming box set of nine no-budget crime pictures produced by Japan’s Toei studio in the VHS era: V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets and BetrayalSubscribe already! It’s good for the soul!

Oh, also I appear on this week’s episode of the Deep Cuts: The Game podcast, doing my best to  point out the most interesting cast members of Happy Gilmore, Back to the Future Part II and Addams Family Values. I am still not entirely sure I understand how the game works, but I had a good time and that’s what really matters, right?

Chilly Scenes of Winter

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome writer-director Jason Buxton, who broke out at TIFF in 2012 with his simmering drama Blackbird — starring friend of the show Connor Jessup — and returned to the festival last September with Sharp Corner, an equally unnerving psychodrama starring Ben Foster as a family man who becomes obsessed with the idea of emergency preparation, and Cobie Smulders as his understandably concerned wife. It opens in theaters in the US and Canada this Friday, so this was the perfect excuse to get Jason on the show,

And Jason picked another quietly devastating drama: The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s 1997 adaptation of Rick Moody’s autobiographical novel about two families in a small Connecticut town confronting the death of hope in Nixon’s America.

I’m oversimplifying, of course, but that’s pretty much it — exquisitely performed by a truly incredible cast that includes Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Jamey Sheridan, Sigourney Weaver as the adults and Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd as their kids. It’s a film that offers a lot of room for interpretation, and Jason was more than up for digging in.

So listen up! Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you sit on a stalled train waiting for the power to come back up.

And then you can dig into last week’s Shiny Things, where I wrote about Criterion’s new 4K editions of Sean Baker’s Anora and Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat and an excellent trio of UHD upgrades from Warner: Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales and Pale Rider. If you haven’t already subscribed … well, there’s a very simple way to do that, you know.

The Lonely Ones

There must be something spooky about April. Last week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie tackled Nicolas Roeg’s landmark horror story Don’t Look Now, and this week the film under discussion is M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 breakout The Sixth Sense, the one where Bruce Willis is a therapist trying to make a connection with a troubled little boy who sees … well, you know.

My guests, writer-directors Austin Abrahams and Andrew Holmes, are pretty well-versed in genre movies that aren’t quite genre movies, having just released the eerie drama The Island Between Tides, a loose adaptation of a forgotten J.M. Barrie play that stars Paloma Kwiatkowski as a young woman who effectively haunts her family, despite being very much alive.

It’s a mood piece more than anything else, and an engaging one, and after a run out west earlier this year it’s playing at the Carlton in Toronto and the Mayfair in Ottawa through Thursday, May 1st. If you’re looking for something a little different, you should check it out. Listen to the episode, you’ll get the idea.

Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you look for the keys to your study. I’m sure they’re around somewhere.

And after that, you should check in on Shiny Things, because last week I wrote about the pleasures of practical, goopy ’80s monster movies — specifically Roger Corman’s Alien knockoff Forbidden World and Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps, both of which were restored and released in 4K last month by the maniacs at Shout! Studios. Glorious fun, those. And of course if you had a subscription you’d already have read it! So you should subscribe, is what I’m saying.

Seeing Too Clearly

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a little shorter than usual, owing to the demands of a press day. Or maybe it’s just a Nicolas Roeg thing, since Clio Barnard’s episode on Performance was recorded under similar constraints.

But having to speedrun a movie like Performance has its benefits, I suppose, since it forces the guest to drill into the things they love most about it and the impact it had on their artistic development. And it’s much the same with Sam Rice-Edwards and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, the miasmic 1973 thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie as an English couple trying to recover from a tragic loss by losing themselves in Venice, only to discover their grief continues to stalk them … along with something else.

Sam, who’s an editor by trade — and whose latest project, the archival documentary One to One: John & Yoko, is in theaters now — was struck by the film in a very specific way, and we get into that, as well as Roeg’s remarkable ability to guide us through what should have been an incomprehensible narrative and That Ending. I know I say this every time, but if you have yet to see the movie, please watch it before you listen to this episode. It’s kind of crucial, really.

Won’t you join us? Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you work on that big cathedral restoration you’ve been planning for years.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, why not? Last week, I celebrated Arrow Video’s preposterous new 4K edition of Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight — which might be his best movie, as it turns out? — and there’s a lot more coming because for some reason everything comes out at the end of the month nowadays. Feels inefficient somehow, but that’s the business for you. Have you subscribed yet? Feels like something you ought to do.

Hope in the Darkness

Happy National Canadian Film Day! This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie features the return of Ingrid Veninger, a singular filmmaker whose work carves out a profoundly personal path.

She first appeared on the show in 2015, tackling John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence; this week, with her new film Crocodile Eyes screening at VIFF Centre Thursday afternoon as part of their Canadian Film Week series, she’s back to talk about David Lynch’s 2006 experiment Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern as “a woman in trouble” and pushing both actor and audience further than Lynch ever had before. Now that it stands as the last feature he ever released, it has a slightly more melancholy reputation … but it’s a great topic for discussion, and Ingrid has plenty to say about its impact on her own creative development.

You know how this works: Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you watch the rabbits do … whatever it is they’re doing.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, why not? Last week I covered A24 and Elevation Pictures’ slightly different discs of Babygirl and The Brutalist, as well as Via Vision’s excellent new Blu-rays of Man Bites DogIn the Bedroom and Shattered Glass. If you were a subscriber you already knew that, of course. And if not, there’s a pretty simple fix. See you there.

Strange Connections

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a bit of a wild swing, since the movie that my guest Samir Oliveros discusses so eloquently is suddenly very hard to find.

Now, when Samir pitched me Ildikó Enyedi’s Of Body and Soul for the podcast, it was streaming on Netflix in North America; by the time we got around to recording the episode, it had vanished from the service, and it’s not currently available on any domestic VOD services as far as I can tell. I would blame the tariffs, but that’s silly; in any case, there’s a Mubi Blu-ray in the UK and if you’ve got a multi-region player you should definitely seek this out.

You should also seek out Samir’s new film, The Luckiest Man in America, in theaters in the US and Canada right now after a well-received premiere at TIFF last fall. It’s a stranger-than-fiction psychodrama about an Ohio man who won $110,000 on the game show Press Your Luck in 1984, an amount that should have been impossible to win … except that Michael Larson did it. Paul Walter Hauser plays Larson, so you can get a sense of how this might play out. (If you’re in Toronto, you can still catch it at the Lightbox.)

So soldier on! Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it to tune out the awful sounds of your workplace. Sorry it doesn’t help with your other senses.

And then you can shift over to Shiny Things, where I wrote about the new 4K editions of the Valentine’s Day releases Companion and Love Hurts, one of which feels like an instant classic. So that’s nice. You’ve subscribed already, right? Of course you have, you’re not a monster.

“I’m Not Finished.”

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Tracie Laymon, the writer and director of the indie charmer Bob Trevino Likes This — a small movie about an unexpected connection that is so much richer and more lovely than anyone has the right to expect, powered by exquisite performances from Barbie Ferreira and John Leguizamo and a quiet sense of wonder at the simplicity of human connection.

So maybe it’s not surprising that Tracie wanted to talk about Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, another very delicate construction that asks a lot from its audience … but gives so much back. I’m starting to think it might be Burton’s best film, even with the Johnny Depp of it all, and Tracie is definitely on board for a conversation about loneliness and meaning and conformity and how the specific eccentricity of an artist’s vision can burn a movie into your heart forever. It’s a good one.

You can subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you work on your latest topiary masterwork. Just be careful fitting those earbuds.

And then you get to catch up on Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about my love for all things Star Trek — specifically Lower Decks and Prodigy and Galaxy Quest, all available in sparkling new editions from Paramount, and Severin’s new 4K editions of Antiviral and Delicatessen. But of course you’re already a subscriber and you knew all about them. Wait, you’re not? It’s cool, go get caught up.

Finally, if you’re in Toronto on Thursday evening, I’m hosting a screening of Jamie Kastner’s new documentary The Spoils at the Lightbox, and Jamie and U of T law professor Mayo Moran will be joining me for a Q&A afterwards. It’s a good movie! You should come, you’ll learn stuff!

What We Owe Each Other

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie offers a really nice pairing of guest and feature, if you’re keeping track of such things.

My guest is Naomi Jaye, a Toronto writer-director whose excellent new psychodrama Darkest Miriam opened the Canadian Film Fest last night in advance of starting its Canadian theatrical run this Friday, and she chose Krzysztof Kieslowski’s magnificent Three Colors: Red, the crowning chapter of his trilogy on the French flag … and, sadly, the film that now stands as the final cinematic statement of a master filmmaker we lost far too soon. Kieslowski died 29 years ago this month, aged 54.

We talk about all of it, and Darkest Miriam as well — which is an exceptionally creepy drama featuring a terrific lead turn from Severance breakout Britt Lower that you’re not going to want to miss. No spoilers, though. Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the ferry ride as you contemplate the interdependence of our lives.

And then go get caught up on Shiny Things, because I covered a lot of ground last week! I wrote about the new releases of Wolf ManWerewolves and Y2K, and the 4K restorations of Deep Blue Sea, TommyGodzilla Vs. Biollante and Night Moves. (It was a really good week for monsters.) C’mon, subscribe already! Think of what you’re missing!

Dancing, Always Dancing

I guess March is a time for musicals. Just two weeks after Atom Egoyan tackled Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar for his episode of Someone Else’s Movie, here comes Ali Weinstein — whose wonderful, melancholy documentary Your Tomorrow was one of our world premieres at TIFF last fall — with Jewison’s other big studio musical, Fiddler on the Roof!

Made two years before Superstar, it’s a much more ambitious picture in terms of scale, a properly epic transposition of the Broadway musical shot on location in the former Yugoslavia with a cast harvested from various stage productions and the Yiddish theater. It was a critical and commercial hit, it was nominated for eight Oscars and won three (including John Williams’ first), and it’s endured for more than half a century among the Jewish diaspora as a treasured cultural artifact, which is how Ali and I were both exposed to it as children.

And weirdly enough I do manage to find a link to Your Tomorrow … which is also ultimately about preserving the memory of a time and place to which we can no longer return. It’ll be streaming as of 9am ET this Friday, March 21st, on the TVOntario YouTube channel, and it’s airing on the old-school TVO at 9pm ET on Sunday the 23rd. It even ends with a musical number. Don’t miss it.

And don’t miss the podcast, either! Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and enjoy our weirdly personal reflections as you make your rounds and await a sign — any sign — that your god is listening.

And then why not check out the latest edition of Shiny Things, where I spun up Arrow Video’s truly incredible new release of William Friedkin’s Cruising — a movie that never really clicked with audiences, for all sorts of reasons, but now plays like one of his most complex and fascinating pictures. But surely you’re already  a subscriber. Aren’t you?

Also, if you’re reading this on Tuesday the 18th there are still a few tickets available for tonight’s Secret Movie Club, which is a good one and promises to have a very lively Q&A afterward. Come on down!

Ten! Years!

I have trouble believing it myself, but this week marks the tenth anniversary of my starting Someone Else’s Movie — which is ridiculous, right?

But here we are, and for this very special episode I’m joined by Felix-Antoine Duval, a brilliant young actor who just won the TFCA’s award for Outstanding Performance in a Canadian Film for his role in Sophie Deraspe’s excellent Shepherds. (After premiering at TIFF last fall and returning for a Canada’s Top Ten screening in February, it’s back at the Lightbox right now in regular release.)

And Felix picked another recent Canadian knockout, Pascal Plante’s disquieting psychological thriller Red Rooms, which stars Juliette Gariepy as a young woman who spends her days attending a murder trial in Montreal and her nights online, doing … stuff. We don’t exactly spoil it in our conversation, because I don’t think you can spoil what Plante and Gariepy (and Laurie Babin, and Max McCabe-Lokos) accomplish with this movie … but you haven’t seen the film, please seek it out before you listen.

Suitably intrigued? Join the celebration! Subscribe to the show on AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you sit quietly in court, waiting for your moment.

And then you can catch up to last week’s Shiny Things, which was just one edition about Paramount’s new 4K release of Gladiator II — a stunning presentation of a very hollow film. There’s a lot more coming down the pike, though, so please subscribe if you haven’t already.

Oh, and I’m doing stuff in public this week! On Saturday the 15th I’ll be at Toronto Comicon for an edition of Aaron Reynolds’ Bootleg Safari panel, trying to determine the best and worst knockoffs of Alien; it’s at 6 pm in Theatre 2, come watch me talk about secret genre treasures with the man who makes birds swear about politics. (Where does XTRO fit in? Take a guess!)

And Tuesday, March 18th, is the next edition of TIFF’s Secret Movie Club, where once again I’ll be presenting the Toronto premiere of an upcoming picture that we think is quite good. You should come! It’d be great to see you.

My other other gig.