Winter may finally be behind us, but this week on Someone Else’s Movie, I’m spending a little more time in the cold.
It’s for a good cause, though! Documentary filmmaker Ken Wardrop has a new movie, So This is Christmas, making its North American premiere at Hot Docs on April 30th, about the efforts of five people to make it through a difficult holiday season, and it’s as compassionate and kind as the rest of his work so I’m happy to boost the signal.
And Ken picked a big one: Doctor Zhivago, David Lean’s equally gargantuan follow-up to Lawrence of Arabia, with the same epic sweep but putting the geopolitical struggle in the background, the better to play up the appeal of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie making grown-up goo-goo eyes at one another while Russia burns. Or freezes, I guess.
It’s a nice wide-ranging chat about aesthetic influences and artistic methods, and while neither of us sings “Lara’s Theme” at any point you should know we were thinking about it the whole time. Go listen!
You know the deal: Find the show at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and listen to it as you stare across the bleak Siberian wasteland, wondering if you will ever again see your beloved.
And then you can catch up on Shiny Things, where this week I wrote about Paramount’s physical releases of the fourth season of Star Trek: Lower Decks and all of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, just in case the whole streaming thing doesn’t pan out. You’ve subscribed, right? All the cool kids are doing it.