This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is … well, it’s just plain fun.

I’m joined by actor Hamza Haq, the Transplant star who’s currently on screens across Canada in Fawzia Mirza’s lovely The Queen of My Dreams, and who’ll be coming back to those screens April 12th when With Love and a Major Organ opens nationwide.

Both films cast him as a romantic lead, but in very different modes: Queen capitalizes on his magnetism by casting him as a full-on dreamboat, while Organ asks him to play someone so withdrawn he’s practically inert. (It’s a comedy, so that’s okay.)

You should check them both out, is what I’m saying. But first, you should listen to Hamza discussing his love for Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the 2005 blockbuster that brought a more grounded approach to the Caped Crusader after a decade of more stylized interpretations, and set a course for superhero cinema as the defining narrative form of the early 21st century in a way the early X-Men and Spider-Man movies couldn’t.

More to the point, Nolan’s movie had a very profound impact on teenage Hamza, which is why he brought it to the podcast — and the result is a delightful conversation about world-building, casting, myth-making and heroes, with Hamza revealing his massive inner nerd right off the bat (no pun intended, I hate puns), reconnecting to his younger self and just generally having a great time. I did too. Like I said, this was a fun one.

What to do? Find the show at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the secret earpiece inside your cowl.

And then catch up on Shiny Things! Last week, I spent a few thousand words spinning up the new Imprint editions of Mountains of the Moon, Face to Face, The Dresser and Lenny, Shout Studio’s comprehensive 4K boxed set of the American Ring cycle and Arrow’s 4K upgrade of original-recipe Ring director Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water. All good stuff, and there’s more coming. You should probably subscribe, huh.

Can you believe I’ve been making Someone Else’s Movie for nine years? I can’t. But it’s true! Last week marked the ninth anniversary  of the launch, and I was so caught up in other things that I barely noticed.

It’s still the thing I enjoy most about my career, and while there was a time that I considered stopping with episode 500, I’ve decided to keep going. As long as it’s still fun, and as long as it results in episodes like the one I released today, why would I quit?

Today, I’m joined by Teresa Sutherland, who wrote The Wind and made her feature directorial debut last year with the very creepy Lovely, Dark, and Deep. And Teresa brought on one of the cultiest cult movies of this new century, Joel Anderson’s remarkable 2008  mockumentary Lake Mungo — a film that was barely released outside of its native Australia, but has captivated pretty much everyone who’s managed to stumble across it, Teresa and myself included.

And so we leapt in, discussing the elements of family trauma and otherworldly natural spaces that connect the film to Teresa’s own  movie — which is freshly available on digital and well worth your time, by the way.

Where to listen? Surely you know by now: Find the show at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while obsessively rolling back and forth through old camcorder footage in search of … well, you’ll know it when you see it.

And then catch up on your Shiny Things! Last week, I looked at a trio of new releases: Warner’s 4K editions of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and The Color Purple (2023 musical version) and Criterion’s Blu-ray of Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. Style and substance! Subscribe now or I won’t be responsible for you getting cultural scurvy.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by actor and filmmaker Cody Lightning, whose directorial debut Hey, Viktor! is arriving in theaters across Canada this Friday after bouncing around the festival circuit for almost a year, with stops at TIFF, ImagineNative and Canada’s Top Ten. (In Toronto, we’re delighted to have it back at the Lightbox. Tickets available here!)

It’s a goofball delight, with Cody playing a less secure version of himself desperate to restart his acting career by mounting a sequel to 1998’s Smoke Signals by any means necessary, abetted by his well-meaning but hapless producer pal Kate. (She’s played by Hannah Cheesman, who received one of the film’s three Canadian Screen Award nominations last week; Cody scored the other two, for lead performance in a comedy and sharing a screenplay nod with Samuel Miller.)

Anyway, it’s a lot of fun and you should see it. But first, listen to Cody discover Mystery, Alaska, the almost entirely forgotten 1999 dramedy about a small town that goes nuts when their beloved hockey team is picked for an exhibition match with the New York Rangers. I can honestly say I hadn’t thought about this movie in at least fifteen years, but that’s the beauty of the podcast: Everything comes back around eventually.

You know how this works: Find the show at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web for the long early-morning ride to the rink.  It’s a fun one!

And then you can catch up on your Shiny Things, in which I am very pleasantly surprised by the magic of Paul King’s Wonka and less surprised to discover Stephen King’s miniseries version of The Shining has not aged especially well. Not that it was ever that good in the first place, of course. You’ve subscribed, right? Come on, it’s just polite.

Oh, also, I’m probably not supposed to tell you this but next Tuesday night’s Secret Movie Club will be an especially memorable one. Grab those tickets while you can.

I’ve been producing Someone Else’s Movie for nine years, and today’s episode is number 490. Somehow it’s taken this long for someone to pick Jurassic Park.

I am, honestly, shocked. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster is the very definition of a pop classic, in that you would be hard-pressed to find an adult human who hasn’t seen it, and doesn’t like it. (Even if you don’t love it, you almost certainly don’t hate it.)

So when writer-director Michael Lukk Litwack — whose delightfully odd lo-fi sci-fi rom-com Molli and Max in the Future is now playing in theaters across the U.S. and soon to be available on VOD across North America — said he wanted to tackle it, I had to triple-check my back catalogue to make sure no one had done it before. I was sure we had. But nope! It was all his, and honestly? I’m glad it worked out this way.

Want to listen? Of course you do! Find the show at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it on the helicopter ride to Isla Nublar. It’s a fun one.

And then go catch up on Shiny Things! This week I wrote about Warner’s new 4K edition of Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion and the excellent new Criterion Blu-ray set of Eric Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons. You can subscribe right here if you haven’t already, and if you haven’t already I don’t know how else to entice you. I work really hard on this thing! Jeez!