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.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I welcome writer-director Adrian Murray, whose small-scale psychodrama Retrograde opens across Canada this Friday. It was one of the highlights of last year’s Canadian Film Festival, even though I didn’t get to write about it, and now you finally get to see it!

But before that, listen to Adrian tackle Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s breakout ramble through the lives of a bunch of teenagers in Austin on the last day of school in the early summer of 1976 —  a movie that both of us underestimated on first viewing, but which we’ve come to appreciate as the movie that told us everything about who its director was, what sorts of stories he wanted to tell, and where he’d be taking us in the future. What a picture, you know?

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web. And also! Shiny Things celebrates its first anniversary this week, so if you’ve been reading these posts about it for a year without subscribing, shame on you. Just this week, you missed me writing about the intimate apocalypses of Deep Impact and Knock at the Cabin, and how Paramount’s 4K release of Adrian Lyne’s Flashdance feels like the unearthing of an invaluable cultural artifact. So subscribe already!

Oh, and if you’re knocking around Toronto on Sunday, you should know that we’re screening Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink down at the Lightbox as this month’s See the North selection, which means the screening is free and Kyle will be joining us for a virtual Q&A afterward. Want to sink into a formless, disquieting video feed from hell for a hundred minutes on a balmy spring evening? Who wouldn’t, right? See you there.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is an interesting one, as writer and producer Ian Carpenter brings Harmony Korine’s Gummo onto the podcast … and, in revisiting it, discovers that the film that rocked his world a quarter-century ago doesn’t hold up quite as well as he thought it would.

This comes up every now and then when we revisit movies that meant something to us when we were younger– we change while the films don’t, so what does that say? — but I’ve never had the chance to go through it with a guest, and Ian was totally up for the conversation. I think you’ll enjoy listening.

The usual rules apply: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download it directly from the web. And then you can get onto catching up with last week’s Shiny Things, where I checked out the new Blu-ray editions of Aftersun and Living and flew myself back to childhood with Warner’s 4K box of the Christopher Reeve Superman cycle. Are you a subscriber? No? What’s wrong with you? Jeez.

This week on Someone Else’s Movie, the conversation gets a little existential because we’re talking about one of the best metaphysical dramas I’ve seen in recent years: Nine Days.

I put Edson Oda’s brilliant, moving study of life, death and whatever lies in between on my Top Ten list for 2021 — but it was lost in the rush of titles delayed by the pandemic, and hardly anyone saw it.

Blue Jay and Meet Cute director Alex Lehmann did, though, and the arrival of his new drama Acidman on VOD this week gave us the excuse to chat about it, and how incredible Winston Duke is, and how even more incredible Zazie Beetz is, and why Edson Oda should be encouraged to do whatever the hell he wants for the rest of his career.

You should listen! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download the episode directly from the web.

And then make sure you’re all caught up on your Shiny Things, because last week I reviewed Universal’s killer-robot venture M3GAN and Criterion’s splendid releases of Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe project. Good stuff all around! You’re a subscriber, right?  No? Cool, cool cool cool.

Also, a heads-up: Next Tuesday, May 9th, is the last Secret Movie Club of the current season, and we’ve got a nice little picture from one of my favorite American writer-directors to send us out on a high. Tickets are still available, so come join us if you’re in town — it’ll be a fun night!

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie has been almost seven years in the making — ever since I ended up in a Newark departure lounge with Melanie Scrofano in October 2016. We’d just met earlier that afternoon at a Barnes & Noble in Tribeca, where she and  the Wynonna Earp crew had been doing a panel — I was in town, and stopped by to say hi to Emily Andras and give her some pastries from Locanda Verde up the street, it was a whole thing — and a couple of hours later, there we were waiting for the same flight home. So we got to talking, and I pitched Mel the podcast, and without a second’s hesitation she said “Oh, sure. Let’s do Inglourious Basterds“.

I’ve been saving it for her ever since, and after a whole bunch of life stuff we finally got to do it. And here it is, an energetic conversation that finds us ping-ponging all over Quentin Tarantino’s filmography, not bringing up Wynonna Earp at all (sorry!) and probably not spending enough time on how much fun she’s having chasing Emily Hampshire and annoying Jonas Chernick in The End of Sex, which opens across Canada this Friday and is the ostensible reason we did the episode. But give it a listen; there’s plenty of other entertainment value here.

Also, I am shocked that, despite Reservoir Dogs being my very favorite Tarantino film, I blanked on Michael Madsen’s character being called Mr. Blonde. It’s not a color, is why!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download the episode directly from the web. And then you can catch up to last week’s Shiny Things newsletters if you haven’t already; I wrote about the immense pleasures of Magic Mike’s Last Dance, which finds Steven Soderbergh and Channing Tatum back doing the things they do best, Shout! Factory’s 4K release of the long-lost English ghost story The Haunting of Julia and a pair of invaluable Imprint boxed sets: Directed by Roland Joffe and the second edition of the After Dark: Neo-Noir Cinema Collection.

… you’ve subscribed, right? It’d be a lot cooler if you did.

It’s National Canadian Film Day today, and I’ve spent most of this week barrelling towards tonight’s gala screening of Breakaway at the Lightbox … for which tickets are already sold out, sorry about that.  But I’m carving out a couple of minutes to type this up so you can still keep track of my stuff!

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by actor and filmmaker Vanessa Matsui — who made the charming and spiky web comedy Ghost BFF,  and whose first feature Midnight at the Paradise is having its hometown premiere this Friday night at the Paradise Cinema — about another charming, spiky relationship picture: Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which should have nabbed Emma Thompson another Oscar nomination and which absolutely should guarantee Daryl McCormack a long and thriving career as a leading man.

It’s a fun listen, even if I couldn’t settle on a consistent pronunciation of “Leo Grande”. (Weird, how you get in your head sometimes. Which of course is what the movie is all about.)

You know how it goes: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download the episode directly from the web. And then go get caught up to Shiny Things, because there’s lots of good stuff there: Last week I wrote about Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, Cohen Media Group’s fairly wonderful Jacques Rivette restorations and Shout Factory’s excellent 4K releases of two ’80s masterpieces: Midnight Run and Streets of Fire.

Don’t make a face. You know I’m right. Subscribe already! And happy National Canadian Film Day, go pet a moose or something.

This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is but a short one; my guest, actor-turned-filmmaker Frances O’Connor and I, only had a brief window of time to talk about her love of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 drama Biutiful and the Sisyphean challenge of leaving the world a little better than you found it.

We also talked about her directorial debut Emily, which is now available on digital and on demand in Canada; you can rent it right here on TIFF’s digital  platform if you’re so inclined! And you should, because there’s a scene with Emma Mackey and a mask that’s just riveting.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify, or download the episode directly from the web. It’s right there! And then get caught up on your Shiny Things reading; last week I tackled Warner’s new 4K editions of The Maltese Falcon, Rebel Without a Cause and Cool Hand Luke, and Paramount’s very pretty 4K boxed set of the Picard-era Star Trek movies. Is your subscription up to date? It’s coming up on a year now, you know.

Also, if you’re in Toronto and reading this on Tuesday the 11th, maybe check out TIFF’s Secret Movie Club page and see if tickets are still available for tonight’s screening? It’s a good one. See you there, I hope!

This week on Someone Else’s  Movie , I welcome writer-director Joseph Amenta — whose first feature Soft, about three queer kids obsessed with getting into a Toronto nightclub, was one of the best things we screened at TIFF last year, and which finally starts its commercial run this Friday at the Revue Cinema — to talk about the movie that helped him see cinema in a different way: Sean Baker’s Tangerine.

Tangerine has sort of faded away over the last few years, overwritten in Baker’s filmography by The Florida Project and Red Rocket, but it couldn’t be more relevant to the current moment — as a deeply empathetic portrait of two trans sex workers having a really bad Christmas Eve in West Hollywood. What could have been a stunt (especially considering the whole shot-on-an-iPhone thing) instead turned out to be something small and intimate and honest, a movie that truly sees its characters from every angle. It’s informed Baker’s cinema ever since, and Joey took the right lessons from it as well.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download the episode directly from the web. Listen, enjoy, be inspired.

And then get on over to your inbox and catch up on the latest Shiny Things newsletters; over the last week I’ve dug into Shout! Factory’s new 4K edition of The Exorcist III, Arrow’s Blu-ray of Black Sunday and Paramount’s 4K restoration of Dragonslayer and Blu-ray release of the first glorious season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It’s all good! Come check it out!

Also also: We’ve booked a really great film for next Tuesday’s Secret Movie Club, so if you haven’t snagged your ticket yet you should really get on that. See you at the Lightbox, I hope.

In this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Sarah Watts — whose first film You Can Live Forever, which she co-directed with friend of the show and actual friend Mark Slutsky, is now in theaters across Canada — to talk about the transformative experience of seeing Bound in her twenties, and how the Wachowskis’ debut feature shaped her own perspective going forward.

It’s a fun one; Sarah’s story of getting to see the movie is definitely unique, and the conversation is enthusiastic and engaged. So if you haven’t thought about Bound in a while, by all means get on board with us!

How, you ask? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher and/or Spotify,  or download the episode directly from the web. And then catch up on your Shiny Things; last week l looked at the home releases of The Whale (great) and Babylon (ugh), and Criterion’s new Blu-ray of David Lynch’s Inland Empire (quietly perverse). You haven’t subscribed? What’s wrong with you? Get on that!

Jeez, I have to do everything around here.