"The next one is The American President. I’ve been talking a lot about romantic comedies lately because of Sleeping with Other People, and you know, I’m listing all my favorite rom-coms, and you’re talking about When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and things like that, that could just as easily be on this list for me; I watch those movies all the time and love them. But I realized it took me a second to realize that The American President is a romantic comedy, because it has a political angle, and it’s got that [Aaron] Sorkin dialogue. But it’s directed by Rob Reiner, and ultimately it’s just a full-on love story between these two people that also has snappy banter and comedic scenes. I think Annette Bening gives one of the best comedic performances of her career; she’s so specific. There’s a scene where, it’s like before her first date with the president, played by Michael Douglas, and she’s sitting in the office and she’s tapping her pen on the desk. The guy says to her, “What’s up? You got a hot date tonight?” and then she does this move where she goes to put the pen in a jar, and the whole jar falls over. There was something so effortless and so specific about that to me; it’s a moment that jumps out at me, in terms of making the work you’re doing funny, but still feeling in the moment. I don’t know how many times she shot that scene, but it looks so natural. When I watch it, I find it hard to believe that it wasn’t really an accident that she knocked over that jar, and that’s incredible. I love that movie, and I love Annette Bening. And her hair. And her shoulders, her shoulder muscles when she’s dancing with the president in that blue dress. These are all things I aspire to."

"Growing up on movies on TV, part of the Universal package was a very, very weird and creepy movie called The Black Cat. Which is ostensibly based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story, but wasn’t. It’s a devil-worshiping movie with Karloff and Lugosi, and it’s directed by a guy named Edgar Ulmer, who was a very promising European director whose career ran afoul of the fact that he slept with the boss’s niece or something like that and got, basically, blackballed by the major studios. But before he did that, he was able to make this very, very dark and very dreamlike horror movie, which only runs about 65 minutes. It’s an art deco nightmare, and it’s got all these very perverse ideas and concepts running through it. It’s like watching somebody else’s bad dream. It’s really a wonderful picture. I mean, Karloff has given better performances. The Body Snatcher is probably his best performance outside of Frankenstein, and that was on my list, but between The Body Snatcher and The Black Cat, I have to go with The Black Cat, because it’s so off-beat and kind of unique. There aren’t a lot of other movies like it. The interesting thing is, now these movies are actually available to see. When I was growing up, you had to wait until two o’clock in the morning on Friday; they were going to run some movie, and if you didn’t watch it then, they weren’t gonna run it again for another year and a half or more. And you’d fall asleep anyway, you know. It was so hard to see these things. You had to really seek them out. The Mario Bava movies, I had to go to the lowest dives, the crappiest grindhouses, to see these things, and often the prints were all beat up. But now, all this stuff is available, and it looks great. I just don’t think film lovers realize what a paradise they’re living in right now. [laughs] For those of us who really had to go the distance to seek these things out, it was really quite arduous."