"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."

"I hadn’t seen Sideways in a number of years, and recently saw it again, and sat down with it and was overwhelmed at how much more meaningful it had become in the years since I had seen it. I don’t know why – I guess it’s just really cheesy: Like wine, it had aged for me. (I’d take that out, that was so cheesy!). But it had matured for me as a story, or perhaps I had grownup to meet the story – it was so lyrical and so authentic in every moment. Stories about failure, to me, are more meaningful as I get older. That movie also swings big, and that’s another thing that I like about it. That monologue, Virginia Madsen’s monologue… it’s just achingly romantic. [And] the end, where he drives up, sort of mirroring The Graduate, but it’s Dustin Hoffman, the loser version, which is way closer to me than the heroic version in The Graduate. [The movie] just keeps curving into itself, and out of itself, and it’s just an incredibly satisfying, enjoyable, meditative movie. It’s got some incredible performances – everyone is a delight, everyone is just incredibly fun, and each scene has something interesting happening in it. [Sandra Oh] was another inspired bit of casting. Her mother, and the kid, and she’s amazing, and the motorcycle helmet rage was one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen on film – and a flopping penis, that’s always good."