Some distant day, anthropologists will consider as a landmark in humankind’s evolution – comparable to the capacity for destroying ourselves by nuclear obliteration – the adolescent gene’s newly emergent power to dictate nightly TV viewing. Steve Erickson Read Quote
At the age that I was when I stopped reading comics, and with a set of talents that would seem to mark a future comic-book auteur, my son has had only a passing enthusiasm for the medium. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle. Steve Erickson Read Quote
Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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 Read Quote
If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both ‘The Americans’ and ‘House of Cards’ is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals. Steve Erickson Read Quote
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. Steve Erickson Read Quote
