On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I get to talk to a guest I’ve been chasing for a while … and the conversation is everything I hoped it would be.
For like a decade and a half now, Michaela Watkins has been an acerbic, vulnerable, magnetic presence in shows like Casual and The Unicorn and The Dropout, in movies like Enough Said and You Hurt My Feelings and Sword of Trust and Werewolves Within, even on two seasons of Saturday Night Live — and at last, someone’s built a feature film around her.
Two someones, actually! Dane Clark and Linsey Stewart, who cast Watkins as the eponymous empty-nester in Suze, a modest but charming project that’s playing in theaters across Canada right now.
And because Watkins is a sharp, interesting person, she wanted to revisit Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, the 1983 teen romance that helped shape what ’80s movies were going to be — but arrived early enough that it still has its own weird energy. It’s hard to explain in a paragraph, but we hash it out over the course of the episode, while also talking about the ways in which the film influenced Watkins’ own personal development, and what it means to have come of age in a decade that wasn’t quite as progressive as teen girls needed it to be.
You can find the show at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web and play it on the car stereo while you neck with that hot new bad boy. It’s a good one, I promise.
And then you get to catch up on your Shiny Things, now that I’m getting back to a regular publication schedule. Last week I tackled Sony’s latest Columbia Classics 4K set and spun up new editions of Darkman, Footloose, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny and the Gate movies, and of course there’s almost two years of back issues waiting to be discovered. Subscribe right here if you haven’t already … and if you haven’t, why haven’t you? It hurts my feelings.