We don’t often talk about public bathrooms, but trust me: Sooner or later, you’re going to need one. Good weather and the end of the stay-at-home order mean people are about to spend a lot more time out of the house … but COVID has made a lot of public facilities inaccessible, complicating things for city planners and individuals in need of a pit stop.

Because this week’s NOW is all about getting outside, for today’s episode of NOW What I talked toilets with Lezlie Lowe, author of No Place to Go, and Toronto parks and rec spokesperson Jane Arbour. It’s a complicated issue — though it doesn’t need to be — and I actually learned stuff! You can too!

And of course there’s my usual beat. Here’s this week’s What to Watch page, and here are my expanded reviews of Sweet Tooth and the new season of Feel Good … you know, if you need a reason to stay inside this weekend.

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I’m joined by Alyson Richards — writer and producer of the new queer survival thriller The Retreat — to talk about a movie that couldn’t be further away from that project if it tried.

That’s because it’s The Goonies, Richard Donner’s frenetic 1985 family adventure which is still beloved by people who grew up watching it as kids themselves … and of which those of us who were just a little older when it came out are not entirely fond. But that makes for a really fun conversation, and I’m delighted to have been a part of it. We even discussed the octopus!

You know you want to be part of this. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web.

And then you can go listen to today’s NOW What, which is also a film episode! I talked to Shelter‘s Ron Chapman and Lune‘s Aviva Armour-Ostroff about what it means to be bringing features to this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival. I’ll have more TJFF stuff online tomorrow, but this should get you rolling. (Update: Here’s more stuff!)

Also! There’s a new Saw movie, and it’s just as frustrating and unimaginative as the previous eight Saw movies! My review of Spiral: From the Book of Saw is right here on the NOW site, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

No, I didn’t post a Friday post this week. In my defense, I didn’t have a lot of keyboard time: I spent most of the afternoon getting my second vaccination, which left me a little flattened yesterday. But I’m back to myself now and filling in the blanks.

So! Friday’s episode of NOW What was a conversation about art, which is always nice, expanding on Kelsey’s look at the AGO’s Portraits of Resilience project by the two of us talking to contributors Amanta Scott, Deborah Farquharson, Katy Catchpole, Keith Eager and Mariana Topfstedt about how they created the images they submitted. You can find it at the bottom of Kelsey’s story, or on your podcast platform of choice.  I think it sets a record for the largest number of guests we’ve had on an episode!

Also, the usual stuff: Here’s this week’s What to Watch page, which includes my reviews of French Exit and Wrath of Man; I also contributed a few reviews to our Inside Out festival preview, and there’s some other stuff that should go live today or tomorrow that I’ll update on Tuesday.

And now, I have to get back to the thing I was supposed to do yesterday but couldn’t complete because of my aforementioned Robust Immune Response.

Totally worth it, though.

Karine Vanasse is one of the people I’ve wanted to get on Someone Else’s Movie ever since I came up with the idea for the podcast — she’s smart, she’s sensitive, she’s passionate about cinema. She’s just a generally lovely person, and I knew she’d be a great guest.

It took six and a half years to make it happen, and we only had half an hour, but I’m very happy with the way her episode turns out, and I think you’ll be happy too.

Karine wanted to talk about Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the quietly devastating Eliza Hittman abortion drama that was one of the best movies I saw last year, as well as one of the very last movies I saw in a theatre (twice!) before the world shut down.  I was more than happy to have that conversation, and my only regret is that we didn’t get to keep talking. We could have gone a lot longer.

You know what to do:  Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web.

And then you can check out today’s episode of NOW What, where Richard and I talk to union activist Jennifer Scott about how her organization Gig Workers United is trying to stop Uber from changing labor laws to give people even fewer options than they currently have. It’s depressing, I know, but there’s a sense that the good guys might win this one … or at least fight it to a draw.

Oh, and also I wrote this week’s NOW 40 at 40, finally telling the story of how we came to put Emma Stone on our 2010 TIFF cover. I tried to recapture just a silver of the white-knuckle panic we were all feeling before it came together, but honestly you don’t need that anxiety right now.

And once you’ve read that, you can check out the latest episode of Jeremy Lalonde’s Black Hole Films, which finally delivers on the challenge left hanging at the end of last month’s 48 HRS. episode: That’s right, rockers, we’re celebrating Streets of Fire! Or more precisely I am, while Jeremy, Rob Scarborough and an especially flabbergasted Marilla Wex try to make sense of Walter Hill’s magnum opus while I fire trivia points at them because I’m the only person on the planet who watched the feature-length documentary that came with Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray.

It’s a blast. Enjoy it!

Okay, this post was supposed to be up yesterday but I couldn’t get it it to go live until today because the internet is a stupid jerk. Anyway, look! It’s up!

Today’s NOW What picks up on Tuesday’s episode, tugging further on the thread of the violent footage being broadcast on social media, specifically its effect on people of color.  Rad wrote a cover story about it, and he and Kelsey join me to discuss the phenomenon from a more personal perspective on the podcast. It’s more about having the conversation than reaching a conclusion, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out.

Also! There’s a whole new What to Watch for you, along with expanded reviews of Army of the Dead and 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything if you’re so inclined.

I try to be thorough.

Look, I wanted to do a Friday post, I really did. I had plenty of stuff to post about! But I just didn’t have time, and then it was Saturday and then it was Sunday and Monday was a blur and now it’s Tuesday again and here we are.

Still, no post on Friday makes for an extra dense post today, so that’s nice. Start with the latest episode of Someone Else’s Movie, where I welcome writer-director Jessica Ellis to talk about the upbeat, entirely commercial pleasures of The Martian, as enjoyable a film as Ridley Scott has ever delivered. We also talk about her own movie, What Lies West, which just came out on VOD last week and which I liked a lot.

Give it a listen! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. And then there’s so much more to listen and read!

Like today’s episode of NOW What, for instance, which finds me talking to Jamil Fiorino-Habib about the way social media has changed the calculus on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and how our individual experiences of social media on this topic can be very different. And then there’s Friday’s episode, in which Enzo talks to Toronto lawyer Caryma Sa’d about the service she’s doing for us all by monitoring those ridiculous lockdown protests.

Rather read words? There’s last week’s What to Watch page, full of reviews and recommendations, and our list of fifty great films currently streaming on Netflix, which took a lot longer to put together than you might think. (I started writing my capsules in February!) One title you will not find in that list is The Woman in the Window, which is garbage, as I explain at length in this stand-alone review because the movie was embargoed and couldn’t be included in the digest.

Oh, and I checked in with Ben Wheatley about the making of his new eco-horror thriller In The Earth. There’s even video!

That’s everything, I think. More on Friday, assuming everything works out the way it’s supposed to.

(It probably won’t. Apologies in advance.)

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I finally get to put Ryan Noth on the show. I’ve been enjoying his stuff for more than a decade now, in both features and documentaries, and his new drama Drifting Snow is a lovely, small study in connection and compassion that’s been circling release for more than a year, thanks to the stupid pandemic. And while I’m disappointed you won’t be able to see it in a theater, at least you can finally see it.

Ryan picked Old Joy for his episode, and the links between Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 breakout and his own movie will be immediately apparent to anyone who’s seen both of them. And if you haven’t, don’t worry; we cover most of that ground in the course of our conversation. I think you’ll enjoy it.

You know how this goes: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web and listen at your leisure. And then you can move on to the new episode of NOW What, which is also a travelogue of sorts: I talked to Drew Hayden Taylor about his new APTN series Going Native, in which he bounces all over North America exploring the ways in which Indigenous people are reclaiming and reinventing their culture.

You might want to keep a notepad handy for the literary recommendations Drew throws out; I’m planning to start with Moon of the Crusted Snow.

Schedules being what they are, it’s time for another bonus Friday episode of Someone Else’s Movie — and the movie is very, very special: Scott Abramovitch, whose new film Eat Wheaties! just landed on VOD, is here to talk about Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, which remains just as clear-eyed about human nature (and as sweet, and as funny) as it was sixty-one years ago.

How did they manage that? Well, Scott has thoughts. I have thoughts. You probably have some of your own, so you should spin up the episode and see if any of them line up with ours!

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. And then you might want to listen to the latest episode of NOW What, which gets all ambitious about the Contact Photography Festival, squeezing in two separate interviews with artists Jeff Bierk and Esmond Lee that come at the idea of art from very different directions. 

And then you’ll want to read stuff, right? Here’s this week’s What to Watch page, featuring all manner of reviews, and here’s my conversation with Invincible creator Robert Kirkman, which can also be enjoyed as a YouTube experience.

Also there are Hot Docs reviews aplenty, because that’s still a thing until Sunday. Go wild! Just don’t watch the bad ones. That’s what the ratings are for, remember?

On this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie, I talk to Mary Holland — co-writer and principal scene-stealer of last year’s Happiest Season, and now the star of the very goofy arm-wrestling comedy Golden Arm — about Michael Patrick Jann’s Drop Dead Gorgeous, Michael Patrick Jann’s beloved and now-slightly-problematic 1999 mockumentary about a beauty pageant with a body count.

We had a blast, with a weird digression into Man Bites Dog and Funny Games that ends up making total sense in context. My one regret is that we didn’t have enough time to talk about Janice Cramps, the character Mary threw at Tatiana Maslany and Kristian Bruun a couple of years back on Comedy Bang Bang. Genius, truly.

Wanna listen? Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher to get the episode instantly, or download it directly from the web. And then you can move on to a couple of other podcasts that dropped today.

There’s the latest episode of NOW What, where Kelsey Adams interviews filmmaker Jennifer Holness about Subjects of Desire, the documentary about fifty years of the Miss Black America pageant that’s now screening at Hot Docs. And then there’s my third appearance on Todd Van Allen’s Comedy Above the Pub, where Todd and I spend two full hours and three whole minutes catching up on pandemic stuff and the Oscars.

… oh, and also I wrote about yesterday’s Inside Out 2021 launch announcement. More movies, huh. Swell.

Hot Docs 2021 is upon us, and as you can imagine we are all about it this week. Here’s NOW’s review directory, which will be updated over the course of the festival, and here’s today’s episode of NOW What, in which I talk to Citizen Minutes producers Lisa Jackson and Lauren Grant about how they delivered eight short documentaries without ever meeting their directors in the flesh.

And here are all the regular things you expect from us: NOW’s What to Watch column for the week, and our monthly lookaheads for Netflix, Amazon, Crave, Disney+ and CBC Gem. I also wrote a thing yesterday about David Cronenberg announcing a new movie; that’ll be nice, I hope.

Stay warm, everybody. April’s going out cold.