You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

Corporate irony not only ridicules the thing it is selling but the very act of selling it. In the process it disarms critics by making anyone who goes against the flow of commerce seem clueless.

Never throw fruit at someone who understands the theatrics of the situation better than you do.

Mi-yammi! The extraordinary city, with its Judeo-Cubano population, its mix of surgical-appliance and sex-fetishist obsessions, takes the American melting pot past the boil. It represents pretty much everything Patrick J. Buchanan hates.

The action comes at us through a buzz of nattering remarks.

You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.

Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you.