Words matter. These are the best Steve Erickson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The first books I remember having an impact on me when I was a kid were L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ books, which were much stranger than the movie: at once rather whimsical and really dark.
The beautifully composed imagery of ’12 Years a Slave’ underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that’s poison to the touch.
A street is a story in asphalt – so it’s a paradox that the streets are the one place where the movies play fast and loose with continuity, something to which L.A. streets lend themselves as naturally as does the city’s psyche.
L.A. streets aren’t just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city’s sensibility.
As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.
In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America’s biggest band of the early ’60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.
Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers.
The ’80s convergence of comics’ new adult sensibility with the movies’ advancing technology was bound to catch the attention of even slow-on-the-uptake Hollywood, and this particularly was true when ‘Watchmen’ and ‘The Dark Knight Returns’ became phenomena.
Beautiful women get in Hollywood’s door quickest and then are shut out when their beauty no longer measures up to whatever it is that Hollywood or audiences decide is beautiful enough; once they’re inside, their choices are limited by the same beauty that won them their entree.
In retrospect, ‘Pulp Fiction’ isn’t just the template for everything Tarantino has done but the yardstick by which everything else he does is measured one way or another.
I rode the buses in L.A. until I was in my early 30s, and there’s something about driving or riding through L.A. after sundown, when the Utopian city goes into hiding and another city comes out, more Doors and less Byrds.
Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water’s surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
Taking place in some Nordic-looking hinterland where all the seasons are out of whack, ‘Game of Thrones’ is the most aggressive example since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ of a genre that’s perceived as adolescent aspiring to be fully adult.
Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.
The ritual of families watching TV together passed into antiquity around the time I was my son’s age; that was when households tended to have a single television and when the choices of what to watch were manageable.
I don’t know how many modern families watch ‘Modern Family,’ but then one of the points of ‘Modern Family’ is that it’s hard to tell what a modern family is anymore, let alone what it does.
Americans disagree about America because the most common consensus as to what America is or has ever been or ever was meant to be eludes us, and it eludes us because we want it to.
Inside every TV star is a movie star screaming to get out, and Donna Frenzel, with whom I’m guessing you’re not instantly familiar, made George Clooney a movie star once and for all in the first ten minutes of his fifth feature, 1998’s ‘Out of Sight.’
It’s not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it.
To an extent, our relationship with the movies is always subjective. Our capacity to be involved says as much about each of us; I’ve never fathomed why anyone would want to spend four hours in the company of the exceedingly tiresome Scarlett O’Hara.
That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, ‘The Godfather,’ is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord’s youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father’s empire.
For thousands of years, we’ve insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood’s view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade’s view of everything else.
Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy?
Quentin Tarantino is my 15-year-old son’s favorite director, and by that I mean no condescension to either Tarantino or my 15-year-old son.
If Lincoln is among history’s truly great men, he didn’t achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln’s destiny.
I’ve decided ‘Breaking Bad’ may be one of the best TV shows ever, but I had to watch every last episode of the first four seasons to come to that conclusion.
Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.
I think we can fairly conclude that writer-director Joss Whedon didn’t make ‘The Avengers’ for me.
Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that’s been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue – the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.
Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison – each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.
In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer’s 1928 ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc,’ one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
In journalism, as in politics, other people’s lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.
Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment’s prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.
What we call ‘the news’ always has tried to tell a story, and it’s always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling.
Notwithstanding the likes of ‘All the President’s Men’ in the 1970s or HBO’s recent ‘The Newsroom,’ film and TV have always loved to hate the press.
When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.
The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, ‘Bird,’ was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood’s potential as a filmmaker.
There’s no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.
Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.
‘Homeland’ is necessarily open-ended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving as little as possible, with a story’s usual need for resolution replaced by an unrelenting urgency that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure.
Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality’s finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.
Among the gorges and ravines that hang on Los Angeles’s shoulders like a necklace, Topanga – nestled in the cleavage of the Santa Monica Mountains – is the most singular of ornaments.
I don’t know for a fact, but I feel fairly certain that the first person who described a movie as ‘character driven’ had to have been a producer or studio executive.
Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago.
