The fact that I’m posting this on a Friday morning should give you a sense of how busy this week has been — the marathon of programming has turned into a sprint, and also a wind tunnel somehow? Anyway, I’m grabbing a few minutes to update the blog.
This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie has been sitting in a hard drive for months, biding its time, waiting for the chance to sneak out into the world.
That’s because Chuck Russell, a longtime genre stalwart whose films include two of my favorite reinventions, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III: Dream Warriors and The Blob, picked Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon, which Warner Home Entertainment has been restoring in 4K for a while now. They’ve finally scheduled the disc for release next month, so here we are!
To be honest, we don’t spend a lot of time on the movie itself; Chuck was more interested in talking about the experience of watching Bruce Lee as a kid, and how Lee’s fight choreography revolutionized action movies for decades to come. Which was fine by me; I always try to let the guest set the mode of conversation in an episode, and free-ranging chats are always a lot of fun. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web like the master villain you are. And then go catch up to Shiny Things! I’ve had to slow down the publication schedule in recent weeks, but things should be ramping back up soon; the most recent edition dug into the lovely new Shout! Factory 4K editions of George A. Romero’s Creepshow and Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, two horror classics that are very much of their time, and all the more fascinating for it.
And if you’re in Toronto, here’s a reminder that V.T. Nayani’s This Place is back at the Lightbox tonight (Friday, July 7th) at 6:30 pm for a special screening with Nayani and co-stars Devery Jacobs and Golshan Abdmoulaie in conversation with Saffron Maeve; tickets are still available right here. It’s really good, and you should go.
Oh, and also I wrote about David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers for a new CBC Arts project about the 50 best films directed by Canadians. It’s a great project, and not just because Rad wrote forty of the capsules and my TIFF colleague Kelly Boutsalis got the #1 slot with Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Check it out over the weekend, it’s a really fun read.