A couple of weeks back, I had Globe & Mail film critic Barry Hertz on Someone Else’s Movie to talk about his book on the Fast & Furious movies; for this week’s episode, I welcome another Toronto film friend with a movie project of his own.
The friend is Eric Veillette, a journalist, programmer and cinema archivist whose new documentary Emmanuelle in Ontario looks at the censorship of Just Jaeckin’s adult-cinema smash Emmanuelle, and the extremely mild controversy that shook the province for a few weeks in December of 1974.
Emmanuelle in Ontario was produced to accompany the new 4K restoration of Jaeckin’s film, which comes to disc next week as part of Severin Films’ elaborate Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection, an 11-disc boxed set that collects the original Emmanuelle trilogy — the ones with Sylvia Kristel — and throws in an earlier Italian adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel, I, Emmanuelle. I’ll be tackling the set in Shiny Things next week, so consider this a preview — an exhaustively researched preview, with all sorts of fun digressions into the cinematic landscape of the ’70s, and the specifically weird ways Ontario complicated its transition from film to video. It’s a fun one! Even if Emmanuelle itself isn’t quite as entertaining as it was cracked up to be.
Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or just download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you lie listlessly in one of those hammock chair things, thinking about all the pleasures that await you or whatever.
And speaking of Shiny Things: I’ve been gorging on year-end stuff for the upcoming TFCA awards, but I did make the time to write about The Conjuring: Last Rites, and how this purportedly final chapter is almost certainly not the last we’ll see of James Wan’s ridiculously successful horror series.
And of course paid subscribers got my weekly What’s Worth Watching newsletter on Friday. Be one of them! Sign up right here, or upgrade your existing subscription to the paid tier! You have room in your inbox, right? That thing goes on forever!