Steve Erickson

“The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.”

“Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Escapism always has its place, but when movies connect to other things around us and suggest implications that haven't been considered before, that's a dividend, too, even when our love of movies becomes complicated as a result.”

“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.”

“'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.”

“The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.”

“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.”

“Drawing the desperate and the adrift, Los Angeles has long been the dumping ground of dreams both real and cinematic.”

“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.”