Eric André

“All right, this next one is Hollywood Shuffle. If you’re a Blacktor, like me, or even a half Blacktor, this is mandatory, mandatory reading. It’s a bit meta as a movie. It’s a movie about the Hollywood industry, but it’s a movie about what Black actors go through. I saw this when I first moved to Los Angeles and then, twenty-three years later, I finally got a job.”

“Okay. I’m glad you have Uncut Gems, not only because it’s a great movie. I befriended Josh, and he is the one that told me at the beginning of quarantine, I was, like, drinking all day and watching movies, and I was, like–...”

“The very first movie Josh Safdie ever recommended me is Sorcerer, and I love William Friedkin. I think this is actually perhaps his best movie, and that’s saying a lot, because I think French Connection and The Exorcist are two of the best movies ever made. I don’t like hyping a movie up too much. I like when you stumble upon something like… I like that Josh was just, like, “I don’t know, watch… watch Sorcerer,” because I was going into it with no expectations, knowing nothing about it, and I… Some people are so good at making movies, they, like, piss you off. It’s like, “Fuck you, William Friedkin, you fucking talented motherfucker.””

“Okay, we got Bob Fosse, my man. All That Jazz. And I heard Bob Fosse in an interview said he smoked five to six packs of cigarettes a day, so he smoked 100 to 120 cigarettes every day. And he was a professional ballet dancer. He’s just such a fascinating guy.”

“The only other auto-biopic I can think of is Richard Pryor made Jo Jo Dancer. He’s the architect of modern comedy and he was so brilliant and vulnerable and tortured and he had a really tough life. But he had an amazing, prolific… We’re all his kids. So I love both these movies. These guys were both tortured geniuses. And I used to have romantic notions about being tortured for your art, but there’s nothing cool about it. You want to keep your sanity if you can.”

“House, I think this is one of the greatest movies ever made. There’s not a single movie like it. Every lore I’ve heard about this movie is, like, one mind-explosion after the next, and it’s the great… it’s one of the greatest movies.”

“Is this Battle of Algiers? This is like City of God or the Safdies would cast – they call it street-casting, casting real people – this guy cast actual Algerian separatists, literally people that would, like, bomb French discotheques. He would cast to play versions of themselves in this movie. And this movie is, like… I think it’s like one of the best movies ever fucking made.”

“And Les Blank, total ledge. Les Blank goes into parts of Louisiana where people… He’ll find some 114-year-old Black grandmother who… not only is French her first language, she never learned English. He finds all these subcultures, in America and documents them, and they’re just some… they’re beautiful and they’re fascinating, and he, like, stays out of the way. Whenever I can’t think of things to watch, I’ll just put on Les Blank.”

“Okay. I’m done. I’ll get Malcolm X. Yeah. Come on, Spike. Knicks in five, baby. This one’s for Spike.”

“I’m not, like, a Cassavetes expert, but I love his movie Shadows, because it’s hanging on by a thread. It feels like it’s edited like a Ornette Coleman saxophone solo. It’s completely atonal, if that term made sense for filmmaking. If you ask me about A Woman Under the Influence or another Cassavetes film, I’m gonna stare at you with a blank stare. I’m not an expert, but Shadows rules. It rocks. Period. On God. No cap. For real, for real.”

“Jackie Chan’s the most talented living human being on the earth. He can do martial arts comedically and he’s, like, a multi-platinum-record-selling singer. Police Story. And I’m glad you guys got this, I’m excited to see his early stuff. He’s a ledge.”

“Jackie Chan’s the most talented living human being on the earth. He can do martial arts comedically and he’s, like, a multi-platinum-record-selling singer. And I’m glad you guys got this, I’m excited to see his early stuff. He’s a ledge.”