"Granted, it’s a little shameless for the guy who wrote a book on 1999 movies to include a pair of entries from that year on his list. But whenever I made a top ten for that year, these are the two films that constantly duked it out for the number one and number two slots. One’s a tightly structured, egalitarian high-school-set comedy that’s as wise about the nightmares of adolescence as it is about the doldrums of middle age; the other’s a happily absurd fable of reinvention that’s part sci-fi, part broad comedy, part media satire. But both are remarkably kind to their flawed heroes, and each one wrestles with the kinds of social and cultural dilemmas—from identity theft to burn-it-all-down political posturing—we’d be dealing with two decades later."

"A Clockwork Orange. I was absolutely stunned by the entire thing. That’s a Warner Bros movie too, so they’re smiling right now. That’s an amazing movie. Everything about the execution is flawless. I saw that at a revival house when I was about 19 years old. There was a theater on 99th and Broadway called The Metro and all they did was show old movies, so in 1982 I went and I saw something from 1971 and it was 11 whole years old, and it was considered an old movie. Can you imagine seeing something from 2003 and having it being considered an old movie? That movie just blew me away. I couldn’t believe the level of violence at the beginning, then I couldn’t believe the social satire and everything, the execution, the slow motion, the way it was composed. And Malcolm McDowell’s performance? I was just riveted by the whole thing. It blew me away."

"I would be embarrassed to begin to talk about Dr. Strangelove, because there has been so much written about it. It’s so bleak. And Peter Sellers is perfect. He’s just perfect. Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick built this doomsday political satire, in the fists of the Cold War, and made the end of the world hysterical. We’re bumbling idiots, all of us. We’re all walking through dark rooms of our life, bumping into furniture, and it’s shocking. I think we all enjoy watching people who are in authority positions act like bumbling idiots; it satisfies part of our ego, I’m sure, on some level. Sellers’ commitment to those characters… the scene that stands out is when he’s trying to get change to make the phone call to stop the bomb, and that security guard won’t let him break government property to get the change. The frustration of that is as painful as it is hysterical."