… okay, so I’ve been a little busy. My TIFF duties ramped up over the weekend, and I’ve been offered more intros and Q&As and even an invitation to the odd social event.
It’s still nowhere near as exhausting as covering the festival as a journalist, mind you. Sometime Sunday morning, I realized it was the total absence of the undercurrent of anxiety that comes from racing from one event to the next without any assurance that said event will go as planned, or that I’ll be turned away from a screening I’ve been standing in line to see for an hour. This is the first TIFF in decades that I haven’t experienced that, and honestly? It’s kind of wonderful.
I was still doing the racing-around thing, though, and as a result I fell behind in my blogging duties. So I’m here to catch you up on the two episodes of Someone Else’s Movie I released over the last few days.
On Friday, Sophie Jarvis — the director of the excellent festival drama Until Branches Bend (starring friend of the show Grace Glowicki) — tackled Mike Leigh’s ensemble drama Another Year, a film about a retired couple and their circle of miserable friends that can be interpreted in at least two very different ways.
And earlier this week, I celebrated the TIFF debut of my friend Chandler Levack‘s terrific first feature I Like Movies by pulling her episode on Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont’s Can’t Hardly Wait out of the SEMcast vault, because it turns out she was setting up everything she’d do in her film seven years later. It’s kind of amazing, really.
So obviously, you should check them both out! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever and get the episodes right away, or download them directly from the web. Here’s Sophie’s episode, and here’s Chandler’s.
And of course I’m still plugging away at the Shiny Things newsletter, Last week I wrote about I Like Movies and Paramount’s new 4K editions of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the five films that followed, and while this week’s editions might be a little late as well, I think they’ll be worth your time. Have you subscribed yet? Why not? You’re making Elvis sad!
Oh, also my friend Dave Voigt asked me to do an episode of his In the Seats podcast about my transition from journalist to TIFF programmer, and it was a really nice conversation.
We recorded it a couple of weeks ago, so I sound a little more uncertain about what’s coming; honestly, if I’d known how much fun this was going to be, I’d have been bouncing off the walls.