["#1: There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson's extraordinary fifth feature comes dressed in the trappings of a period epic, but this study of Western oilman Daniel Plainview and his engagement with and retreat from the larger world is in fact an absurdist, blackly comic horror movie. It's resolutely unlike anything Anderson, or anybody else, has made before. Daniel Day-Lewis's lead performance is as visceral and ruthlessly focused as screen acting ever gets."]

["In a perfect world, or maybe one that was just, like, super, super, super-stoned on some dope-ass weed . .. like some revolutionary ganja and shit, man. . . . But that'd be the same thing, though, wouldn't it? Perfect. Stoned. Hmm . . . awesome. Um, one sec. I'll be right back."]

["In one scene in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Nikolai (played masterfully by Viggo Mortensen) is standing naked, wearing only a pair of black boxers, in front of a group of old men, pointing and discussing the different tattoos that adorn Nikolai's body. It is the film's ultimate Cronenbergian moment, where the organic body is blurred to have a synthetic purpose and in that moment's case, the recording and retelling of Nikolai's life through the tattoos to the senior members of vor v zakone ('thief in law') before he is accepted to the exclusive brotherhood. The centuries-old practice of etching figures in the epidermis (like proto-men etching drawings of their daily lives in caves) serves less an aesthetic purpose here and more a functional or mechanical motive, quite similar to the vagina-shaped cavity in James Woods' abdomen that hides his firearm in Videodrome (1983), the wounds that elicit sexual satisfaction in Crash (1996), or the hideous scarring in Ed Harris' eye that foretells his moral positioning in A History of Violence (2005), among others."]

["Tigers are alpha predators. They kill and eat animals for food, including humans."]

"If it requires a uniform, it's a useless endeavor."—George Carlin