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

- Steve Erickson

You can't blame movies for embracing spectacle; filmmakers since D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille have loved spectacle, and spectacle is something that movies convey like no other medium, especially in a digital age.

- Steve Erickson

'Lincoln' is impressive enough to almost make you forget how much Daniel Day-Lewis dominates the endeavor.

- Steve Erickson

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

- Steve Erickson

L.A. streets aren't just paved real estate but a cosmology, a manifestation of the city's sensibility.

- Steve Erickson

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

- Steve Erickson

In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.

- Steve Erickson

In 1957's 'There's No You,' Sinatra is suspended at the intersection of a loss he can't face and a memory he can't relinquish.

- Steve Erickson

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

- Steve Erickson

I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.

- Steve Erickson

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

- Steve Erickson

For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun.

- Steve Erickson

David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster.

- Steve Erickson

Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.

- Steve Erickson

Can anything be less cool than defending the motion picture academy?

- 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.

- Steve Erickson

As a genre, the noir of post-World War II was based on characters who were weak or repellent, bound to let down us and themselves.

- Steve Erickson

Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the supreme nut jobs in movie history, and of course I mean that in the nicest way.

- Steve Erickson

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

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