This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a little more current than most, tackling a movie that’s in theaters right now with a guest who also has a brand-new theatrical release.

The guest would be filmmaker Carly Stone, whose second feature North of Normal is back at the Lightbox this week after premiering at TIFF last fall; based on the memoir by Cea Sunrise Person, it’s a thoughtful coming-of-age story focused on an isolated child slowly realizing her eccentric family might not have her best interests in mind.

And Carly wanted to talk about Celine Song’s Past Lives, the quietly devastating Sundance hit starring Greta Lee as a Korean-born woman who finds herself torn between her American husband (John Magaro) and the boy (Teo Yoo) she left behind, with whom she’s unexpectedly reunited almost a quarter-century after she left home. It’s a movie about regret and hope, and the way every single one of us will inevitably wonder who we might have become had our circumstances be slightly different. It’s short but very sweet, and we’re careful not to spoil the film. Not that we could, really.

You can find the show on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download the episode directly from the web like it’s 1999. And if you’re in Toronto, you should grab a ticket to Friday night’s 6:30pm screening of North of Normal at the Lightbox, where I’ll be moderating a Q&A with Carly and friend of the show Sarah Gadon. It’ll be a good evening.

And once you’ve booked that, get yourself caught up on the latest Shiny Things newsletter, where I use the excellent new Imprint boxed set of Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty as an excuse to catch up on the other titles Via Vision has rescued from catalogue limbo and rolled out onto Blu-ray. This one’s for the paid tier, so upgrade your subscription if you haven’t already. It’s five bucks a month! That’s like half a banana!

How is it Friday again? I swear I had things back under control. But then other things decided to happen, and then there was this whole other other thing, and oh yeah we’re moving across town in exactly four weeks and so yes, things are still kind of wild.

Look, just pretend everything is normal. From your perspective it probably is! The latest episode of Someone Else’s Movie rolled out right on time, after all, with Emma Hunter (of The Beaverton, Mary Goes Round and three seasons of Moonshine) tackling her wild love for Penny Marshall’s original 1992 comedy A League of Their Own; the only downside to the episode is that the stupid Zoom filter muted her near-hysterical laughter at a throwaway Steel Magnolias joke. But everything else stays in.

The show’s where it always is: You can find it  on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download the episode directly from the web. And then go watch the Amazon series, which has some structural issues but is still very, very good. Plus, Kelly McCormack rules.

Also: The publication schedule for Shiny Things has slowed to once a week for the next little while, but it’s still rolling; last week was all about the new-release shelf, with reviews of Renfield, Scream VI and Evil Dead Rise, and this week I’ll be checking out a half-dozen catalogue titles — most of them new to Blu — from Australia’s ever-surprising Imprint line. Subscribe, wouldja? Knowledge is power, and all that.

Okay, back to figuring out exactly how many Blu-rays I own, in case you thought programming a film festival was a challenge.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I get to explore the joy of loving weird movies so much you eventually have to make your own weird movie.

That’s because my guest is Mel Eslyn, director of the new Mark Duplass-Sterling K. Brown apocalypse comedy Biosphere, and she wanted to talk about The Catechism Cataclysm, Todd Rohal’s goofy 2011 indie about a couple of guys on a canoe trip who may or may not experience an apocalypse of their own.

If you’ve seen the movie, you know exactly what I mean … and if you haven’t, it’s impossible to explain so I won’t even try. Go rent it, you’ll understand. And then come listen to Mel talk about how Rohal’s unique accomplishment may or may not have been a direct inspiration for Biosphere, and also how art resonates with us whether we want it to or not.

Subscribe on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download it directly from the web like you were the last person on Earth.

And then you can catch up to the latest edition of Shiny Things, where I revisit Waterworld, Mallrats and National Lampoon’s Vacaion on the occasion of their new 4K special editions. Fun fact: Waterworld and Mallrats were released just months apart in 1995 (by Universal Pictures and its subsidiary, Gramercy, respectively), and while they had almost nothing in common, the Venn diagram of their fan bases in 2023 is almost certainly a perfect circle. I’m in there too. It’s weird. Go read the thing.

The fact that I’m posting this on a Friday morning should give you a sense of how busy this week has been — the marathon of programming has turned into a sprint, and also a wind tunnel somehow? Anyway, I’m grabbing a few minutes to update the blog.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie has been sitting in a hard drive for months, biding its time, waiting for the chance to sneak out into the world.

That’s because Chuck Russell, a longtime genre stalwart whose films include two of my favorite reinventions, A Nightmare on Elm Street Part III: Dream Warriors and The Blob, picked Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon, which Warner Home Entertainment has been restoring in 4K for a while now. They’ve finally scheduled the disc for release next month, so here we are!

To be honest, we don’t spend a lot of time on the movie itself; Chuck was more interested in talking about the experience of watching Bruce Lee as a kid, and how Lee’s fight choreography revolutionized action movies for decades to come. Which was fine by me; I always try to let the guest set the mode of conversation in an episode, and free-ranging chats are always a lot of fun. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Subscribe on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download it directly from the web like the master villain you are. And then go catch up to Shiny Things! I’ve had to slow down the publication schedule in recent weeks, but things should be ramping back up soon; the most recent edition dug into the lovely new Shout! Factory 4K editions of George A. Romero’s Creepshow and Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs, two horror classics that are very much of their time, and all the more fascinating for it.

And if you’re in Toronto, here’s a reminder that V.T. Nayani’s This Place is back at the Lightbox tonight (Friday, July 7th) at 6:30 pm for a special screening with Nayani and co-stars Devery Jacobs and Golshan Abdmoulaie in conversation with Saffron Maeve; tickets are still available right here. It’s really good, and you should go.

Oh, and also I wrote about David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers for a new CBC Arts project about the 50 best films directed by Canadians. It’s a great project, and not just because Rad wrote forty of the capsules and my TIFF colleague Kelly Boutsalis got the #1 slot with Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Check it out over the weekend, it’s a really fun read.

Hey, Toronto has a new mayor! And for the first time in thirteen years, it’s someone who actually might care about all of its residents rather than just the ones she knows personally. Gives one hope, it does.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome author and actor Priya Guns, who starred opposite Devery Jacobs in V.T. Nayani’s This Place, which premiered at TIFF last fall and returns to the Lightbox next Friday for a special screening with Nayani, Devery and co-star Golshan Abdmoulaie in attendance.

It’s a tender and moving love story, and it’s also about how hard it is to live in Toronto if you don’t have money or status; that’s a theme I’m seeing in quite a few films this year, as it happens, and I hope Olivia’s election last night lets next year’s crop be a little more hopeful.

But mostly Priya wanted to talk about Boots Riley’s audacious debut Sorry to Bother You, a politically charged satire about capitalism and exploitation (and, um, horse DNA) which landed like a hand grenade on the cinematic landscape in the summer of 2018 … and then just sort of disappeared from the conversation when Disney acquired Fox. But it’s still out there, and it’s still brilliant, and Priya had a great deal to say about it.

Go listen! Subscribe on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download it directly from the web to avoid the eyes of the prison-horse-industrial complex.

And then you should catch up to the latest Shiny Things, where I wrote about Criterion’s new 4K release of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and — once again — the renewed relevance of physical media after the  latest round of streaming deletions. (Snap up that Star Trek: Prodigy set while you still can, kids.)

You’ll need a subscription to read it, but fortunately I have a 14-day free trial offer right here! I know, I know. I’m the best.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, documentary filmmaker Kevin Hegge — who’s getting ready for a special Pride Month screening of his New Romantics documentary Tramps! this Thursday at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema — joins me to talk about a seminal film in his personal development: Madonna: Truth or Dare, Alek Keshishian’s 1991 fly-on-the-wall look at the Blonde Ambition tour.

It’s a film, and a subject, that meant a lot to Kevin — and still does, really — and we dig into that, as well as the impact of the film on the larger culture, over the course of the episode. Also, I have a piece of Truth or Dare trivia that I’ve been sitting on for years and years, and I finally get to drop it! That’s always fun.

You can subscribe on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web like Kevin would have done in the ’90s. Imagine how long that would have taken!

And then, get caught up on the latest editions of Shiny Things. I tackled John Wick: Chapter 4 over the weekend, and later today I’ll be posting a look at Criterion’s new 4K edition of The Rules of the Game and Paramount’s UHD upgrade of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds first-season set. Have you subscribed? Please subscribe, I need the validation.

Finally, I want to direct you to a new story in Toronto Metropolitan University’s Review of Journalism about the end of NOW Magazine. Anthony Milton has been working on it for a very long time — he interviewed me for it last September — and though the print version came out in April it’s just been published online this week. It covers nearly a decade of the paper’s decline, with input from quite a few of us, and it’s very much worth reading.

Also, I have to admit I’m delighted to be described as “a jovial, well-spoken man with an easy smile”, which tells you how much better I was doing after leaving NOW for TIFF. A year earlier it would have been more along the lines of “a wild-eyed depressive who can’t put three sentences together”.

Better days.

The programming cycle is back in full swing and I am up to my eyebrows in movies, which is making it a little tricky to keep up with everything — as if these little updates weren’t spotty enough.  So happy Friday, everybody, and I’ll do my best to catch you up.

In this week’s  episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I talked to enthusiastic filmmaker (and even more enthusiastic Ottawa cinema owner) Lee Demarbre about his favorite movie, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch — or at least I thought I did.

Listening back to the episode, it turns out we didn’t really discuss the film itself as much as its impact on action cinema over the decades. Which is a pretty intriguing approach for this picture, and one I’m kind of delighted with. Check it out at all the usual hubs: You can subscribe on  Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web. It’s a fun one!

And then catch up to last week’s editions of Shiny Things, in which I examined my relationship to Michael Bay’s Transformers movies now that they’re all in a big Paramount 4K boxed set, and also caught up with Arrow’s charming special edition of The Last Starfighter and Paramount’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves now that both of those are out in UHD. But you have to update your subscription for those.

That’s about it. Back to work! Oh, but also if you’re in Toronto you should know I’ve programmed another restoration down at the Lightbox, and it’s a goodie: Raiders of the Lost Ark, back on the big screen in a splendid 4K restoration. There are two generations of fans who’ve never seen this with a crowd — if you’re among that cohort, don’t miss the chance to experience Steven Spielberg’s delirious adventure the way it was meant to be seen. Trust me.

So last week on Someone Else’s Movie we did half an hour on Robert Altman’s epic Nashville; for this week’s episode, actor and filmmaker Dan Abramovici and I talk about Stanley Tong’s Supercop for twice as long.

Look, life is random and how are you not going to find things to say about a picture where Michelle Yeoh jumps a goddamn motorcycle onto a goddamn moving train?  Anyway, give it a listen, I’m sure you’ll find Dan just as engaging as I did.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web and it’ll be 1992 all over again.

And back in the present, the Shiny Things production line is hobbling along: Paid subscribers got a couple thousand words on Creed III, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and Cocaine Bear a few days ago.

I aim to be back up to full speed later this week, so make sure your subscription is up to date and you won’t miss a thing. You’ve subscribed, right? Why are you even here?

Yep, you read that right: Someone Else’s Movie has just released its 450th episode. And I know numbers don’t mean anything and the real milestone is the friends we made along the way — which is actually true, in this case — but it’s nice to have reached this one. I’ve been making this thing for eight years now, and I’m proud of it and more importantly, it’s still fun.

This week’s episode exemplifies why that is, as Sean Gunn of Gilmore Girls, The Specials, The Belko Experiment and most recently the Guardians of the Galaxy movies joins me to tackle a movie he holds near and dear to his heart, and which I cannot believe no one’s picked before: Robert Altman’s Nashville, the sprawling 1975 American epic that we’d call his masterpiece if he hadn’t also made McCabe and Mrs. Miller or The Long Goodbye before it, and Secret Honor and Vincent & Theo and The Player and A Prairie Home Companion afterward. So let’s just call it a masterwork, and let Sean explain why he loves it so.

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web should that be your jam.

… really, though, after this many episodes, how have you not subscribed already? Have you been in a hypersleep pod? If so, welcome back! Sorry we have still Nazis.

Also, if you were asleep you might have missed the news that I’ve started a newsletter? Shiny Things is on a slightly erratic publishing schedule at the moment due to more of the same stuff we were dealing with last week, but I’m plugging away at it whenever I can. Over the weekend I wrote about Criterion’s new editions of Targets and Petite Maman, Arrow’s resuscitation of John Woo’s long-forgotten Hand of Death and Film Movement’s restoration of Shohei Imamura’s kinky, quirky Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. Fun for all! Subscribe right here and get caught up; the next one’s coming very soon, I swear.

Sorry for the lateness of this post — and, if you’re a Shiny Things subscriber, for the dearth of newsletters in the last week or so. Family stuff. None of it good. We’re working through it. How are you doing?

I did manage to release an episode of Someone Else’s Movie on Tuesday, though, and it’s a good one: Australian director Robert Connolly, maker of Paper Planes, The Dig and the brand-new Blueback, which is now available on digital and on demand across North America, checked in to talk about wandering into Vincent Ward’s brilliant fantasy The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey at exactly the right time in his artistic development, and how Ward’s time-travel fever dream knocked him on his ass, picked him back up again and set him on a whole new path. We cover a lot in this episode, and it all flows along wonderfully, and I hope you have  fun listening in.

Find it in all the usual spots: You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web like some 14th-century friar who’s only just discovered the counting machine. And then stand calmly by your inbox for this week’s Shiny Things; I promise it’s on the way.