Hey, look at me! I survived the festival!

… well, barely. I’m wrecked, to be honest; exhausted and wrung-out and now dealing with having caught an actual old-school cold in the last weekend of the festival. Also I swallowed a bug on Saturday morning and my throat is still ragged; you can hear it in the intro and outro to this week’s Someone Else’s Movie.

Fortunately, the episode itself was recorded just before the start of TIFF, so I’m hale and hearty and even pretty sharp — which is what you need to be to discuss a film as challenging as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which somehow went unchosen for the first nine and a half years of the show.

But writer-director RJ Daniel Hanna — whose clever techno-horror hybrid Succubus lands on DVD and digital next week — went for it, and I’m so glad he did; it led to a knotty conversation about how Kubrick forces his audience to sympathize with a monster, and then to even empathize with him — and how Malcolm McDowell might have been the only person on the planet who could have played Alex DeLarge.

Also I have a great story about how Kubrick managed to protect his film from its studio, which McDowell told me during the 40th anniversary press tour. (I know he’s told it to a whole bunch of people, but that’s not the point. It’s a great story.)

Join us, won’t you? You can subscribe at all the usual spots — Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it when Beethoven no longer appeals.

And after that,  subscribe to Shiny Things so you don’t miss a single word of verbiage on all the physical releases I can eat, starting with this week’s look at Criterion’s masterful release of Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers and Arrows frankly preposterous three-disc special edition of David Twohy’s The Chronicles of Riddick. The man shot his shot, and you kinda have to respect that.