It’s been barely a month since Deepa Mehta tackled The Garden of the Finzi-Continis on Someone Else’s Movie, but this week’s episode brings another film about a family lazing its way towards its own destruction — symbolically, at least.
The film is Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 drama La Cienaga, as chosen by Toronto documentarian Chelsea McMullan, whom I’ve been following since the days of My Prairie Home, and whose new project, Ever Deadly — created in collaboration with Tanya Tagaq — was a film I was delighted to include in my digital program at TIFF last year.
It was a pleasure to book Chelsea for the podcast, and I think you’ll enjoy our conversation — and then, if you missed it at the festival, go see Ever Deadly as it opens across Canada this weekend.
Where to find the podcast? It awaits you on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or you can just download it directly from the web if you prefer. Whatever works best for you, you know?
And then you can go catch up to the latest editions of Shiny Things, wherein I consider Warner’s 4K release of Black Adam and what it says about the studio’s attempts to wrangle the DC Comics universe into shape, and also look at the long-overdue and much appreciated shift by certain awards campaigners from DVDs to Blu-rays. (Hey, I launched the newsletter to write about whatever I wanted, and I’ve been wanting to write about this odd little situation for a few weeks now. Yay for me!)
Also also! If you’re reading this on Tuesday January 17th, you should know tonight is this month’s edition of Secret Movie Club, and that the film we’re screening is a really, really good one — like, if it isn’t nominated for at least one Academy Award next week something has gone terribly awry in the universe. Tickets are still available, so snap one up and come on down — I’ll see you at the Lightbox.