Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson
Stephen Michael Erickson, pen name Steve Erickson, is an American novelist, essayist and critic. He is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and is considered an important representative of the Avantpop movement...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 April 1950
CountryUnited States of America
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That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, 'The Godfather,' is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord's youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father's empire.
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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.
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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.
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Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.
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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.
Like all paradises, Topanga is pitched at the tipping point of promise and peril.
sinatra
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.
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Nothing is more linear than a street; nothing has a more fixed beginning, middle, and end.
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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.
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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.
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In journalism, as in politics, other people's lives are a currency to be bartered on behalf of notoriety and influence.
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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.
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I rode the buses in L.A. until I was in my early 30s, and there's something about driving or riding through L.A. after sundown, when the Utopian city goes into hiding and another city comes out, more Doors and less Byrds.
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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.