Lubitsch, man. Over more than a decade of Someone Else’s Movie,  this is the first time someone has brought one of the master farceur’s pictures to the show — and I’m so happy that Daniel Robbins chose To Be or Not to Be for his episode.

Daniel is the director and co-writer of the dark comedy Bad Shabbos (now playing in the US, and opening Thursday in Toronto and Vancouver), and he understands the specifically Yiddish nature of Lubitsch’s storytelling: The banter, the sniping, the escalation, the callbacks and, well, the Hitler of it all.

I hadn’t revisited To Be or Not to Be since Criterion’s Blu-ray came out a decade or so back, and it was such a pleasure to see that Jack Benny and Carole Lombard really were in peak form, and that the Nazi stuff lands even harder now, given the state of things. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or you only know the Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft remake — which is fun, but a lot broader than Lubitsch’s version — you should certainly catch up to it when you get the chance. Also you should listen to the episode, because it’s a lot of fun.

And you know how to do that, don’t you? Subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice, or download the episode directly from the web and enjoy it while you’re gluing on your false beard in an eleventh-hour bid to save your theater troupe from the Gestapo. But I’ve said too much already.

Then you can catch up on Shiny Things, which won’t be hard since I only ran one column last week, tackling the new 4K editions of Mickey 17 and Better Man from Warner and Paramount, respectively. Weird, wild stuff, as the kids say. And there’s more to come!

Oh, and also remember when I went to the Chilliwack Independent Film Festival last November? I was on a panel with Slamdance’s Anna Lee Lawson and Calgary’s Brian Owens about how to make films people care about, and it’s up on YouTube now. You might enjoy watching it, if you’re an aspiring filmmaker or you just want to hear stories about how the worst people think they make the best art.