Watch With Jen started 2022 with an episode featuring fan favorite S.A. Cosby, so as we begin wrapping up our third season, it's only fitting that we bring Shawn back to discuss more movies he loves. As kind and genuine as he is knowledgeable and gifted, the first time I ever chatted with Shawn was one week before he released the book that would become a smash success and put him on the map.

The remarkable Blacktop Wasteland won an avalanche of well-deserved praise and awards, including the Anthony and the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Hardcover Fiction Novel. Impressively, his follow-up title Razorblade Tears met and/or exceeded all expectations, becoming a runaway New York Times bestseller, earning Shawn another boatload of accolades, including repeat honors from organizations that celebrated Blacktop Wasteland the previous year. Perhaps the most staggeringly awesome achievement for Razorblade Tears, however, was when it was included as one of the titles on former President Obama's list of summer reads! Yet still as gracious as ever and well-loved among his colleagues, we're all so very proud of Shawn, and, considering that he was working intensely on the final edits of his next novel All the Sinners Bleed (out June 2023), I appreciated all the more his taking the time to tackle a filmmaker that fascinates him in this roughly one hundred minute conversation.

While the first part of our chat is devoted to his own work because fans always want to know what's going on with the screen adaptations of his books and all other news (including my attempts to make him blush with questions from his best friend Nikki Dolson), we then venture north to Toronto to look at the weird, wild, kinky, yet morose filled world of Armenian-Egyptian-Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan.

Drawn to stories of tragedy, regret, alienation, isolation in modern society, and our struggles to connect with one another, in this episode, we look at his two career high-water marks of the 1990s with Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, as well as his biggest box office hit from 2009 in Chloe. Analyzing the films' rich characterization, performances, and our impressions of what Egoyan is trying to say, while we do get deep, we also entertain, whether it's in the tale I share about this time in college when this woman in the quad tried to recruit me to join her escort agency (she had the wrong girl!) or Shawn talking about the beauty of ambiguous endings while touching on his own work. Cinephiles will dig this episode.

Logo: KateGabrielle.com

Theme Music: Solo Acoustic Guitar by Jason Shaw, Free Music Archive

Originally Posted on Patreon (11/14/22) here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/74615939