Today’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is about lost movies, in more ways than one.
See, I was able to book my guest, the writer and director Nancy Savoca, because her 1993 drama Household Saints was recently rediscovered and restored by Milestone Films, and its Toronto premiere at the Revue this weekend gave us the perfect hook. And Nancy chose to discuss another lost film, Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley, which she loves dearly and has been watching on an increasingly fragile VHS tape for decades.
But while we were talking, Nancy also mentioned that in addition to Household Saints, her first two features True Love and Dogfight were also being prepped for re-release in new restorations this spring … and that Criterion would be handling the Dogfight special edition. So I had to clip all of that, and not mention anything about it in the intro and outro, because Criterion’s announcement wouldn’t be happening until noon today, twelve hours after the episode dropped. But now it’s real, and I am over the moon for Nancy and her team.
It’s all for the best, I suppose, Dogfight is a goddamn masterpiece, and a proper celebration is well overdue — and maybe now Nancy will have the juice to lean on Criterion to do something with Sugar Cane Alley, and that’s a win for all of us.
So join us in the celebration, why don’t you? Subscribe at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it in secret while you sit through your French lessons.
And then, of course, it’ll be time to catch up on the latest editions of Shiny Things! Last week’s missives covered two double-bills, as it turned out: I watched Joel and Ethan Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers back-to-back, and then immersed myself in Arrow Video’s new 4K restorations of John Milius’ very serious Conan the Barbarian and Richard Fleischer’s not at all serious sequel, Conan the Destroyer.
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