"Oh God, yes. Cheers. It teaches you that the camera is a weapon that can be deployed brilliantly. What is beautiful about I Am Cuba is that, as showy as it is, it’s not style for no point. It’s an expansive vision of the rot that we brought to Cuba. Whether you agree with its politics or not, it’s not really the issue; it’s really human, and you understand… Well, a poet wrote it. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote it. You understand the humanity of the people in it. Whether they are subject to humiliation, or to the humiliation of capitalism, well, that’s almost secondary to their own inner lives. The movie validates their inner lives, and the camera is a weapon in doing so. Beautiful."

"The seemingly precious whimsy of Wes Anderson’s style masks a sensibility that is at once delicate and magnificently imaginative. The Royal Tenenbaums has been described as an adaptation of a great novel that doesn’t exist, and it is set in an upper Upper West Side that also doesn’t exist. Anderson literally creates a world of his own to explore the most primal emotions and family dynamics. There is so much to savor—the sweat suits, the enchanting music, Gene Hackman on a tricycle—and the DVD is also a world of its own, as beautifully packaged as, well, a Wes Anderson film, with Kent Jones’s lucid manifesto defining Anderson’s particular brand of genius, and a great gallery of production design drawings."

"Carver’s spare, minimalist style serves as a writer’s manual for how to get more out of less. In a sentence, or even just a phrase, Carver establishes the mood, the nature of his characters and their predicament. He gives us clues instead of paragraphs of description or lengthy dialogue. I often put people onto Carver, especially when they’ve shown me something they’ve written that needs drastic paring down. Now and then I’ve found it a good corrective when my own writing gets out of hand. My copy of this collection (thirty stories arranged chronologically by the date they were written) is well worn. Carver had something original to show the rest of us, and his early death is a real tragedy."

"Rushmore. That must come up a lot. But it’s funny, and I know that the movie Harold and Maude is probably a big influence on that; but I hadn’t seen that when I saw Rushmore. I hadn’t seen anything like it. It’s really funny. I think Wes Anderson is really hilarious and most people don’t notice, because of the style of the film. Grand Budapest Hotel, to me, was the funniest film of the year, but people saw it as an art film. I think I related to Max as well, because I grew up poor like he did, and when I went to University I did feel like I was kind of pretending of fitting in this world. I related to Max."

"It’s part of New York Stories, with Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette. Nolte plays Lional Dobie, this Jackson Pollack-like artist. I love the subject matter of Life Lessons, it’s just great. Scorsese completely captures the obsession with women, visually and in the storyline. And Nick Nolte is never better — his performance is just f**king unbelievable. He’s on top of his game stylistically, Scorsese, melding heavy style with story without it ever feeling like you’re just watching a director, you know, show off. I never felt that. I’d be curious to see what he thinks of that movie, or how much time he spent doing it, but to me it just felt like kind of an effortless exercise in his talent."