Quotes from Steve Erickson

By the nature of cinema and how it literalizes what we envision, movies can have difficulty replicating that connection we make with a classic book.

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.

I think we can fairly conclude that writer-director Joss Whedon didn't make 'The Avengers' for me.

Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.

The most telling thing about 'Fargo,' both the now-classic movie and the television series, is that it doesn't take place in Fargo.

If 'Fargo' is about anything, it's American madness.

It's not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it.

Created by writer Beau Willimon, who's worked on several political campaigns, 'House of Cards' cannily exploits the current widespread cynicism for our politics, catering to a public scorn that's warranted and also glib in the sort of cheap pox-on-both-houses way that means not having to pay attention.

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.'

Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end.

When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.

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.

Redford always has been a cool presence both before and behind the camera. His best movie as a filmmaker, 1994's 'Quiz Show,' exhibits a classicism verging on self-repression, and the social indignation in many of his films engages more than moves you.

A modern fascination with the fantastic seems to come along every couple of generations, usually at a point when we're future saturated.

Nothing manifests more persuasively the American contradiction than that the author of the Declaration of Independence, a slave owner, wrote an antislavery clause into the document - as if to compel himself to be better than he was - which then had to be edited out so the Southern states, including Thomas Jefferson's own, would sign it.

Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes.

Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' believe it's a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren't altogether wrong.

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.

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.

Like all paradises, Topanga is pitched at the tipping point of promise and peril.

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.

I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can't be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from 'Tokyo Story' to 'Poison Ivy: The New Seduction' and not have a Bergman movie.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

Hopefully it doesn't come as too much of a shock that artists we love watching or listening to for an hour or two aren't always people with whom we otherwise would want to spend 20 minutes.