"Citizen Kane I saw when I was… My dad used to take me to the arthouse theaters, and I grew up on these movies. I was watching Citizen Kane when I was like eight years old, and I just watched it again. I watched it at night and I watched it the next day, and that is the best movie ever made. Nothing really ever comes close to it, and even now, the editing today doesn’t match. I don’t know if Welles did it, but I know he had total authority on the film, and then they took it away from him for The Magnificent Ambersons, and even now, in terms of performance, in terms of film editing, in terms of the cinematography, in terms of the music, all of it just came together perfectly, and it has never really been challenged in any way. I think it stays as fresh today as it ever was."

"Rewatching this film on the other side of my twenties, the overwhelming fact of everyone’s youth really hit me. They’re just eighteen! And suddenly, the whole movie is Degrassi. Suzanne is Paige, Guillaume is Spinner, Bertrand is Jimmy. And Spinner and Jimmy think it’s really funny to take Paige out on dates and make her pay the bills. Then Spinner takes the joke way too far and Jimmy’s caught in the middle, wanting more than anything to seem cool. The final scene at the pool, the bathing suit competition so to speak—everything about it is casually devastating: the rhythm of the cuts, the lighting, the suntan lotion choreography. Bertrand (Jimmy) realizes he and Sophie (Ashley) aren’t superior to Suzanne, they’re just skinny. Man, that scene hits hard. Like Degrassi, Rohmer knows that the most interesting thing about teens is that they’re works in progress. Like, sometimes they actually learn a lesson."

"This is Aaron Bruno’s solo proect. I put this on the list because I’ve been listening to it recently. I tend to find an album that is eclectic enough to keep me interested and I listen to it over and over again, obsessing over it… and then I stop. And I just stopped with this! Ha ha! Well, I’ll probably give it a bit of space and then come back to it. I try and listen to new music as much as I can, but that’s probably the first genuinely eclectic new album that I’ve enjoyed in years. The story goes that somebody in Texas played one of the album tracks and it’s caught on and everybody’s playing it now on their radio stations. And it’s become a sort of mega hit. To me there is some stuff on it that sounds like the Pixies and some stuff that sounds like The Beatles, but it’s all slightly electronic and his voice is great. There’s loads of obviously ad-libbed stuff that they’ve kept in and it’s very cool. Rough round the edges in the right way. It’s not guitar heavy, but there is some really great live drumming happening in it. I think he’s a surfing man who’s influenced by hardcore and stuff like that, but some of it’s very poppy. I think it’s just a guy who is not afraid to explore songs and take them where they feel like they should go, rather than worry about what it’s supposed to sound like. It’s the best new album I’ve heard in years."