Born in the silent era, with the first ceremony hosted by Douglas Fairbanks at the Roosevelt Hotel, the Oscars are a tradition in a business that doesn’t have much of it, and the biggest spectacle in a business that’s often nothing but. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
Being the family’s literate one, my wife doesn’t watch television much, preferring third-world novels, though she’ll sit in now and then when I have on Jon Stewart. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
Even if you haven’t seen ‘The Seventh Seal,’ you’ve seen it. The influence is so vast and insidious, every image of a black-robed, white-faced Death is a rip or parody of ‘The Seventh Seal.’ Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
A modern fascination with the fantastic seems to come along every couple of generations, usually at a point when we’re future saturated. Steve Erickson Read Quote
