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. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson
‘Homeland’ was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become. – Steve Erickson
Walter Cronkite was the last newsman everyone trusted in the same way that the Beatles were the last music everyone loved and Marilyn was the last star everyone concurred was worthy of the word. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson
Walt Disney had a nuclear imagination before the advent of nuclear, some comprehension of apocalypse and rapture deep in his genes. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson
Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative. – Steve Erickson
Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson
All of Wes Anderson’s films are confections, memoirs created in cinematic snow globes, with the subtext that memory is the most extraordinary confection of all. – Steve Erickson
‘Lincoln’ is impressive enough to almost make you forget how much Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the endeavor. – Steve Erickson
Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts act themselves senseless in ‘August: Osage County,’ and by the time they’re finished, they’ve acted their movie senseless, too. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson
In the culture at large, the war over science fiction’s creative validity has been long since won, but guardians at the gates of literature, movies, and TV linger unconvinced, even as other genres fitfully transcend critical perceptions of insubstantiality. – Steve Erickson
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. – Steve Erickson