"I think because this film is so much fun and the food in it is so great, it’s easy to miss how brilliant the actual filmmaking is. The more I watch it, the more amazed I am by Itami’s craft and how he created such a hugely varied, multifaceted set of stories that add up to a beautifully cohesive and fluid film that is so incredibly funny, warmhearted, and wise."

"I think it’s a perfect movie. I think it’s perfect in concept and truly executed to the upmost awesomeness. It’s funny when it needs to be funny. It’s super funny when it needs to be super funny. It also sinks down into some really dark, dark places or whatever. Turns it right back around and gets funny again within a few minutes. I think it’s a brilliant movie."

"I remember reading this memoir some twenty years ago and thinking I had found a long lost childhood friend. With the language of a poet—both incandescent and glaringly fluorescent—Karr recounts sexual abuse, the charm and unreliability of her alcoholic father, and the emotional chaos of her brilliant, beautiful, and mentally ill mother. What emerges in memory is a meditation on truth found in love and self-knowledge."

"One novel that I think will always be a personal favorite of mine is Room. The book is a force of nature: harrowing one moment, poignant the next. I can think of few books that so powerfully convey the lengths we will go to as parents to keep our children safe. And that voice? Brilliant. This is a book that gave me one whopper of an inferiority complex as a writer."

"Alright, I said before that I missed Vonnegut. Well, Don DeLillo isn’t Vonnegut. And he’s not trying to be. He’s like Vonnegut and is an equal wordsmith. DeLillo is also a brilliant observer of life with a deliciously wicked sense of humor. He understands how best to employ irony and uses it to point out our collective anxieties and the absurdities of contemporary living. DeLillo is the shit."

"This mesmerizingly brilliant film noir was Orson Welles’ last Hollywood movie. Dumped into second feature playdates, it’s finally become more popular than Citizen Kane. It was recut and reshot by the studio but a longer preview version surfaced a few years ago and is preferable to the well-meaning but bogus “reconstruction” edit which seems to be the extant version. Both are available on the dvd box set."

"It just cuts in, doesn't it? It's like, 'what the fuck are you doing?' The lyrics are a bit cheesy, but it was written early on, and we forget that the early 80s were only a few years away from the mid-70s, when all really juicy stuff was happening. It's all connected. So you can forgive the cheesy lyrics, and it's a really fantastic song. Brilliant, really."