This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie came together really quickly, but boy oh boy was it worth the rush. I’ve been a fan of Josephine Decker since I saw her early films Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, and that admiration went up considerably further when I saw Madeleine’s Madeleine, a riveting and almost painfully intimate look at a teenage actor disintegrating under the tutelage of a theatre director. Her next film, Shirley, was a less immediate but equally intense meditation on how authors use other people to spark their imagination; her new film, The Sky Is Everywhere goes back to the whirling emotions of the teenage heart for a story about a high-school senior trying to process the death of her older sister, and being pulled in two very different directions as a result.
So I was delighted to be able to snag Josephine for the podcast. and more delighted still when she chose Babe — Chris Noonan and George Miller’s pretty much perfect 1995 adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep-Pig — as her film of choice. I love it too. How could anyone not.
You’ll want to join us for this. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher and get the episode immediately, or download it directly from the web. And then you can get on to everything else I’ve produced in the last week, including a new episode of NOW What where Glenn and I talk to Colin Asuncion, Haley McGee and Bee Quammie about dating in Year II of a pandemic for this year’s Love & Sex Issue, or last week’s What to Watch page and my longer web reviews of Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi (yay!) and Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile (meh).
Oh, and I wrote some words about Ivan Reitman’s passing too, if you’re curious. Have you watched Dave lately? You should watch Dave.