"A gloriously ludicrous slice of 1980s cinematic fromage. Between the infectious Queen soundtrack, eye-popping Technicolor special effects, super hot Italian space princess, outrageous production and costume design, a deranged Max von Sydow spitting eminently quotable lines, and a leading man whose principle qualification was being a Playgirl centerfold, this movie had it all. I must’ve watched it fifty times when I was a kid. It was on a near-constant loop in our living room Betamax. One of the great many things I love about being a father is sharing my beloved childhood experiences with my kids. I was so giddily excited to watch this movie with my children when they were old enough. I couldn’t wait. They turned it off halfway through. I spent the next twenty minutes trying to convince them how awesome it was. They weren’t having it. My kids have terrible taste."

"And then just, even like comedies of the 1980s, I mean the Three Amigos, I grew up with… It’s such a great movie. I was just talking to someone about it actually and I haven’t seen The Jerk before and we were both saying… she’s a director I just worked with and she grew up watching Three Amigos and loved, obviously, Steve Martin and Martin Short and Chevy Chase. It’s such a simple and ridiculous storyline that it just works. It’s like from the off, you’re just in on this little joke, you know. It’s so great. So I loved that when I was growing up. She was telling me The Jerk, I’d never seen The Jerk before, and I watched it a couple of weeks ago for the first time and it was, again, just really great, kind of like, SNL humor that I really love."

"As of this writing, it’s been nearly a year since we lost the talent and spirit of Chantal Akerman. Her 1975 breakthrough feature wowed the international film world after premiering at Cannes to a combination of raves and an audience exodus. Truly a film to return to again and again, Jeanne Dielman expands the possibilities of cinema as an art form. Its durational, physiological impact on the viewer is an absolute revelation. I first saw it on a crappy 16 mm print in college in the late 1980s and didn’t get to see it again on the big screen until the late ’90s—on 35 mm at the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival. Now I like to watch it in segments on Hulu (sort of the opposite of binge-watching) just for the shift in consciousness it induces in me after each twenty-minute chunk. Transcendent."