It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome to The Next Picture Show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film and how it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Scott Tobias here with Keith Thubes and Genevieve Koski.

Tasha Robinson, our fourth panelist, has left early for Christmas, so we'll just have to discuss her favorite movie of the year without her.

Here on the next picture show, we believe that no film exists in a vacuum and that all culture is more interesting in context. So every other week, we get together to talk over a classic film and consider how it relates to a current movie. This week, we're looking at two bright, colorful, swoon-worthy musicals about the power of young love, but with a bittersweet twist. Genevieve, why don't you rip the Band-Aid off and tell us just what that bittersweet twist is? The twist is, Scott, that sometimes things don't work out. Damn it. Everyone seems so perfect together, too. So tell us about this week's pairing. Well, it's been over half a century since the movie musical has been a regular staple of the American movie-going diet, and it's still particularly rare to see a musical written and choreograph for the screen. And it's even rarer still to encounter one as skillfully wrought as La La Land, director Damien Chazelle's splashy follow-up to Whiplash. La La La Land sets the romance between Emma Stone's wannabe actress and Ryan Gosling's wannabe Jazzman against a backdrop of

Tinseltown at its most romantic. And yet for all the hat tips to old Hollywood favorites like

singing in the rain and an American in Paris, the film's love story takes a melancholy term that

recall Jacques de Mies classic 1964 musical The Umbrells of Sherborg. The Ambrales of Sherborg has its own

romantic backdrop in a coastal town of

cobblestone streets lined with charming boutiques and cafes. It also features two young lovers played by Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castell Nouveau, whose plans are upended by fate. And it will also make you cry unless you are a replicant. Scott, are you a replicant? Well, crying shorts my circuitry. So the best I can do is squint when I moved.

But I was plenty moved by both La La Land and the Umbrellas of Shoreborg, which are not only beautifully filmed, performed, and scored, but also have the courage to access deeper truths about love.

We expect to feel happy after watching musicals that aren't directed by Lars von Trere.

But these films are emotional

experiences that leave you appreciating an ending more complicated than happily ever after.

But we're not at the ending here yet on the next picture show. We're at the beginning of our

two-part episode, full of optimism about where this podcast will take us. Please wait for us

after the break. The Umbrellas of Scherberg is one of my favorite movies,

and it's the favorite movie of our own Keith Phipps, whose wife Stevie arranged a private

screening at the Music Box Theater in Chicago for his 40th birthday. The three of us were in

attendance that night, and I've seen the film many times in my life, first discovering it when it

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