All posts by Norm Wilner

Hard Times

It’s election day in the US, and while I am pretty confident that Kamala Harris will beat Donald Trump very soundly on Dobbs alone, one can never be sure. But it’s good to hope for things. It’s literally all we can do at this point.

So this week, because it’s the perfect episode to pull out of the archives and because Lauren Collins has a new show on Crave, My Dead Mom — which is written and produced by Wendy Litner and directed by Chandler Levack — I’m reposting Lauren’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, in which we discussed Gillian Robespierre’s 2014 dramedy Obvious Child and Jenny Slate’s breakout performance as a standup trying to plan her abortion around her gigs.

It’s a really fun episode, and I’m happy to have a reason to put it back into circulation. If you missed it nine years ago, enjoy it! And try not to think about how the timbre of my voice has changed. That’s weird.

Subscribe to the show at AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re sitting in your bathroom waiting for life-changing news. I hope you get the answer you want.

If you’re in need of further distraction, there’s always Shiny Things; last week I wrote about Arrow’s 4K release of Trick ‘R Treat and their J-Horror Rising Blu-ray box, and Severin Films’ resurrections of The Red Light Bandit, The Mad Bomber and Don’t Change Hands, so that’s a lot of weird stuff to go through. It’ll take your mind of some of this, at least.

We’ve done what we can. See you on the other side.

Oh, and also! Tickets are still available for next Tuesday’s free See The North screening of David Secter’s seminal queer drama Winter Kept Us Warm, which we’re presenting in a new 4K restoration from Canadian International Pictures.

It’s a lovely, quietly observed picture and a fascinating time capsule of what downtown Toronto looked and sounded like sixty years ago. You should join us! November 12th at the Lightbox, 6:30 pm.

The Maddest Story Ever Told

Halloween is finally here, and I have a seasonally appropriate episode of Someone Else’s Movie for you!

This week, I’m joined by writer-director Zach Clark — whose striking contribution to the body-snatcher genre The Becomers arrives on Blu-ray today from Dark Star Pictures by way of Vinegar Syndrome — who was very excited to unpack his lifelong fascination with Jack Hill’s grindhouse novelty Spider Baby.

If you’ve seen Spider Baby, you can understand why a thoughtful horror buff would be fascinated by it: Hill’s exploitation quickie about a family of weirdos somehow prefigures both Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and in the casting of both an aging Lon Chaney Jr. and a young Sid Haig it does offer a weird sense of torches being passed, and used to set the previous older alight. It’s relentlessly, unapologetically strange, and there’s a lot to discuss. Also, you should see The Becomers; it’s really good.

Want to join us? Subscribe to the show at AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you endlessly ride the dumbwaiter up and down between the dining room and the dark, dark basement.

And once you’re done with that, we have such Shiny Things to show you! Last week, I wrote about Lee Isaac Chung’s surprisingly engaging Twisters and Arrow’s new 4K release of the first four Hellraiser movies, the Quartet of Torment, and how no one has been able to equal Clive Barker’s original accomplishment … not even Barker himself, really. Subscribe right here, and let me help you make better choices.

Happy Halloween, everybody. You could do worse  than locking yourself inside on Thursday night with a black-and-white CinemaScope double-feature of The Innocents and The Haunting. Go on, be classy.

An Intensity of Feeling

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie went places.  I had hoped it would.

That’s because my guest, Michael Greyeyes, is a fascinating individual — an actor, a teacher, a dancer; a writer, director, choreographer. He’s charismatic and capable and really funny — and as we proved at TIFF last month with RT Thorne’s 40 Acres, when you find a role that lets him incorporate all of his skills he’s absolutely amazing.

(And hey, if you’re in Toronto today, you can see him at his most kinetic in TIFF’s memorial screening of Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, screening tonight at 9pm as part of a mini-retrospective of Jeff’s films.)

Having seen Michael champion Station Eleven for CBC’s Canada Reads project last year, I knew he’d be a great guest for the show — and he was, bringing his whole heart to Wong Kar-wai’s magnificent, melancholy In the Mood for Love … a movie, it turns out, he’d only recently discovered, and fallen for completely.

So this is a good one. We talk about drama, we talk about staging, we talk about the eternal allure of Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, and we also talk about The Light Before the Sun, the short film Michael’s premiering at the Hamilton Film Festival on Saturday, because that’s interesting  as well. It’s a slower conversation than usual, but that works for the film: Wong’s a meditative director, after all.

Subscribe to the show at AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you’re sitting very still, too terrified to speak your heart.

And then go catch up on your Shiny Thingses! Last week I wrote about the new 4K restorations of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, and how they fit into the filmographies of their respective directors. And there’s more coming this week, you’ll see. Subscribe right here so you don’t miss a post.

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

Halloween is right around the corner, so in this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, we turn sadism and mutilation into a pretty fun time.

That’s because my guests are Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti, partners in life and filmmaking whose first feature, the found-footage chiller It Doesn’t Get Any Better Than This was a berserk highlight of TIFF’s Midnight Madness program, It’s continuing to terrify audiences across North America as we speak: Here’s a list of upcoming playdates. (Nick and Rachel plan to be in attendance at most of them.)

Rachel and Nick are goofy, cheerful people who love horror in all of its forms … even the torture-porn genre, as exemplified by their pick for the podcast, Eli Roth’s Hostel. You know, the movie where a bunch of American bros go to Slovakia for a promised sex romp, only to discover that truth in advertising laws are very, very different in the EU.

Are they right? Is Hostel an underrated classic of splatter cinema? Listen and find out!  Subscribe to the show at AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts or on your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while strapped to a gurney, thinking about the choices that brought you to this moment.

And once you’ve done that, there’s plenty of Shiny Things to catch up on; last week, I wrote about the disc debuts of Exhuma and A Quiet Place: Day One and the new Criterion double-bill of Val Lewton’s horror classics I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim, and subscribers to the paid tier got my latest list of weekly recommendations, Want to see what they see? Sign up right here, and get to reading!

… and if you’re reading this on Tuesday morning, there are still tickets available for tonight’s TIFF Lightbox screening of The Void, part of our free monthly See the North series celebrating Canadian cinema. And this one’s in Cinema 3, which is a nice big room for all the Lovecraftian weirdness. So come join us, won’t you?

Whatever It Takes

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Halifax filmmaker Tara Thorne — another veteran of the alt-weekly grind who switched careers later in life to find fulfillment as a writer and director. (I like the sound of that.)

Tara’s first feature, Compulsus, opens across Canada this Friday, and her second, Lakeview, is currently doing the festival circuit, so this felt like the perfect time to have her on the show — and she came in hot with Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria’s ceaselessly entertaining 2019 true-crime drama about the women of Scores, and how they dealt with being exploitated by rich assholes by exploiting them right back.

Okay, it was illegal and whatever, but it was a really fun ride while it lasted, and that’s the fizz that Scafaria brings to the story. Plus, The Dutch has a cameo and that’s all a movie requires to go in the canon nowadays.

Wanna join us? Subscribe at all the usual places — AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it after you and friends hunker down to get your story straight.

And then get caught up on Shiny Things, which last week featured reviews of Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs and the new Ultimate Cut of Bob Guccione’s Caligula, which labors very, very mightily to convince you there’s something serious and honorable in the wreckage of Tinto Brass’ 1979 epic. (There is not, but it’s an interesting proposition.)

I also did another What’s Worth Watching column for paid subscribers, and if you want to know what’s in it, well, there’s a really easy way to find out. See you there!

A Perfect Organism

I truly don’t know why it took so long for someone to bring Alien onto Someone Else’s Movie. We’ve had episodes on Aliens and Alien 3, and there were a couple of times I came close to having to tackle Alien Vs. Predator, but in nine and a half years, no one ever picked the original … until now.

Conor Sweeney, a member of the Astron-6 collective and the star of Steven Kostanski’s retro fantasy comedy Frankie Freako — which opens across Canada this Friday, and is a ridiculous amount of fun — finally chose Ridley Scott’s genre-defining 1979 masterpiece, and we had a really great time talking about it, the franchise it spawned, our mutual loathing of Scott’s dopey prequels and a few other things. You should give it a listen.

So, you know, do that! You can subscribe at all the usual spots — AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you argue with your ship’s computer about decoded distress signals and distressing corporate priorities.

And then you should catch up on Shiny Things, because I’ve been busy! Last week I launched a new recommendations column for paying subscribers, and I covered Via Vision’s lovely double feature of Paul Auster and Wayne Wang’s Smoke and Blue in the Face, as well as some very weird new releases from Severin Films. Not subscribed yet? Just click here and I’ll get you set up.

Then We Came to the End

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, we contemplate the collapse of American society … through a very stylish lens.

My guest, producer and director Alyssa Rallo Bennett — whose latest feature The Arrival landed on digital and on demand last Tuesday — picked Sam Esmail’s slow-rolling apocalypse thriller Leave the World Behind, and that opened the door to both an appreciation of Esmail’s eerily credible take on the end of everything — as experienced by a handful of people thrown together at a Long Island house — and the frankly terrific performances of Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon.

Wanna listen? You can subscribe at all the usual spots — AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and play it in your panic room. It won’t save you, but it might help lull you to sleep.

(And if you like the movie, I’d also recommend Al Horner’s conversation with Esmail on the Script Apart podcast about adapting Rumaan Alam’s novel for the screen and the specific changes he made to the material. )

And when you’re done, assuming the internet still works, catch up on your Shiny Things! This week marks a shift in the way I write the thing; I’m still covering physical media from week to week, that’s not going to change, but I’ve started a what-to-watch advisory for the paid tier that covers streaming releases as well as discs. Last weekend I tackled The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal and His Three Daughters, which respectively dropped on Prime and Netflix last Friday and are both very good.

… other than that, I don’t have much to talk about this week. Still regrouping after TIFF and figuring out what I’m going to do for the next few months. But don’t worry, I’m working on it.

Attitude Adjustments

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 — AppleSpotifyYouTube 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.

And Here We Go

People don’t believe me, but working for TIFF is so much easier than covering it.

Attending a film festival as a journalist and critic is a gauntlet — three weeks of prep, ten days of screenings and interviews — and it’s exhausting.

On the programming side, it’s months of work, but all the hard stuff — the screenings, the inviting (and the passing), negotiating the various logistics — was finished weeks ago. The festival is the celebration, the part where we introduce the movies to audiences and the larger world, and I tell you, it is the most fun I will have all year. It turns out I really love this job.

And one of the movies I’m most excited to put in front of a crowd is Shook, the feature debut of Amar Wala, who joins me for this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie. It’s a charming, spiky and unapologetically authentic movie about a young writer figuring himself out in today’s Toronto, and people are going to love it.

Amar picked Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, with which his own film has certain emotional resonances, even though the characters and storylines are completely different. I’ll just say this: Saamer Usmani’s Ash and Awkwafinia’s Billi would have a lot to talk about if they ever ran into each other in an airport.

It’s a fun conversation, and you should listen in. Subscribe at all the usual spots — AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts —or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it while you sit in  impotent silence at a family gathering. We’ve all been there.

Also, I’m still keeping up with the Shiny Thingses — the next couple of weeks may be spotty, but last week I wrote about Ishana Night  Shyamalan’s The Watchers, just released on 4K by Warner Home Entertainment, and Robert Rodriguez’ Mariachi Trilogy, newly remastered and reissued in an impressive boxed set from Arrow Video. Go on, subscribe! You know you want to.

As Sure As the Sun Will Shine

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by writer-director Ian Harnarine, who spent a decade expanding his 2011 short film Doubles with Slight Pepper into a very satisfying feature film, Doubles, that makes its VOD debut today after its festival and theatrical runs. It’s a story of a father and a son separated by oceans both literal and emotional, and the long road to reconciliation. It’s good!

And Ian chose a film entirely unlike his own: The Harder They Come, Perry Henzell’s reggae-inflected cult classic starring Jimmy Cliff as a musician-turned-outlaw racing through Kingston for revenge on the shady promoters and dirty cops who derailed a promising career. It’s got a body count, and you can dance to it. There’s really no downside.

So crank the sound and get subscribed at all the usual spots — AppleSpotifyYouTube Podcasts —or download it directly from the web and play it while you lie in wait for those greedy fat cats who done you wrong. It’ll pass the time.

And when you’re done, catch up to the latest editions of Shiny Things! Last week I wrote about VVS’ new release of Josh Margolin’s Thelma and the Shout! Studios 4K special edition of the animated classic (?) The Last Unicorn, which is both very special and not quite as special as it might have been. What am I talking about? Only one way to find out.