As if the world wasn’t already in the toilet, we’re in the middle of an absolutely epic internet outage over here. Our fiber feed went down on Sunday morning and won’t likely be restored until early tomorrow, so I’m using my phone as a hotspot and doing everything through mobile data. It turns out hotpost technology has gotten really good since the last time I tried to use it, and I’ve been able to post an edition of Shiny Things and this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie on schedule. So that’s nice.

Let’s start with the podcast: This week I welcome Melanie Oates, whose quietly excellent character study Sweet Angel Baby is opening in select Canadian theaters this Friday, to discuss a film that’s very dear to her heart: Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance’s shattering 2010 drama about a passionate but unstable relationship reaching its natural end. If you’ve seen it, you know how powerful Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are as two people who can’t reconnect no matter how hard they try; if you haven’t, I’d recommend you seek it out before you listen to the episode because otherwise we sound like we’re wildly overpraising a simple domestic study. But it’s so much more than that, thanks to its combination of talent and the circumstances in which it was produced — even if those circumstances probably weren’t ideal.

It’s all in the episode, and you can find it in the usual places: 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 while you’re driving aimlessly around your small town, wondering where it all went wrong.

And then you can cheer up with Shiny Things, which checks out a bad romance of its own: Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York, freshly reissued in a three-disc Blu-ray set from Via Vision’s Imprint label alongside the first-ever BD releases of Gordon Parks’ Leadbelly and Cliff Robertson’s J.W. Coop. I wrote about all three, and also took some time to appreciate Arrow Video’s new releases of Ole Bornedal’s Nightwatch duology and Larry Cohen’s cracked masterpiece The Stuff; if you had a subscription, of course, they’d already be in your inbox. Probably you should get one, huh.

Catch you next week. Say a prayer for my internet service, would you?