"It’s probably not cool to admit you don’t quite get a cult movie. But it’s probably better than trying to act cool by pretending you really dig a movie that you don’t fully understand. There are several other films on the Criterion label that I could expound on sincerely and endlessly: Life of Brian, Robocop, Straw Dogs, Hard Boiled, and The Red Shoes, for example. Instead, for the eleventh movie in my top ten, I would like to include a film that has become something of an intangible Magic Eye picture for me: Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop. There is no movie that I have watched more often in an attempt to unpeel and unravel it. I have seen the film many times, first on Alex Cox’s BBC2 series Moviedrome, once at the theater, and many times in this very Criterion edition. Hell, I even visited some of the locations on a Route 66 trip. Still, I’ll admit that the movie is an endearing puzzle for me. I may not be the right age or nationality to fully crack the enigma of this movie, but the fact that I haven’t stopped trying in twenty-three years has to stand for something. Ryan O’Neal’s character from The Driver and Kowalski from Vanishing Point I feel I can race alongside, but James Taylor and Dennis Wilson always seem way ahead of me, their Chevy a mirage in a heat haze. But the fact that I’m talking about it now and waxing lyrical over it means that it has got under my skin in a way that other movies haven’t. And I will continue to pursue this film, even if I never quite catch up."

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

"Absolutely blown away by the world of Star Wars, Empire and Jedis. [But] my favorite moment of the three is actually in The Return of the Jedi. And I argue this with people who are real Star Wars freaks. “Ewoks ruin the movie.” If you’re going to trifle over Ewoks, and you’re not going to talk about how great the speeder bike scenes through the redwood forests are, then f–k off. Those are some of the greatest action sequences… Okay, yeah, there’s some cute critters to sell merchandise. [But there’s] some [scenes] that I couldn’t even dream up with these unbelievable hovercrafts and modern-looking Stormtrooopers. And Jedi has the best moment. [It’s] at the very end when the Emperor is trying to pull Luke over and, of course, Luke is getting the s–t kicked out of him and getting electricity blown at him. And Luke finally takes his lightsaber and throws it aside and says, “No. I’ll never join you. I’m a Jedi like my father before me.” And the Emperor says, “So be it…Jedi.” And it was the fact that the f–king devil himself gave Luke props and called him by [who] he was. It empowered him. That always gets by people, but that’s my stand-out moment. But Empire, when that movie ended in a cliffhanger, my life was a cliffhanger. Until the next one came out, you couldn’t talk to me, you couldn’t talk to me, dude. I was hanging out with my Ungnaught action figures. Everything in my life went back to, “What do you think is going to happen next to Han Solo?” I promise you, you talk to my family and they will go, “Dane was bananas.”"