Top 34 Quotes by Stephen Hunter

In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture.

'New' movies are almost always hipper, faster, they mix genres aggressively, they smother their genre origins in new form, there are fewer of them, and they tend to cost a lot more money because you usually make more money on the megahit than you do on the steady progression of break-eveners. Except for the horror movie.

The new book is a result of my well-documented... absorption in Samurai movie culture. It's called 'The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger novel,' and it takes Bob to Japan in search of the sword his father recovered on Iwo that has gone missing under extremely violent circumstances.

By the '50s and '60s, war movies had become big and impersonal. They almost never bothered to characterize the Japanese enemy as particularly evil; in fact, they never bothered to characterize him at all.

'Shall We Dance?' takes a small, exquisite Japanese movie and turns it into a big, stupid American movie. Still, it must be said that as glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a good big, stupid American movie.

As long as 'Pearl Harbor' stays in the past, it's perfect; when it wretchedly changes gears in the late going, it becomes the wrong kind of same old story: Hollywood stupidity and callowness, writ large across the sky.

The horror movie will not go away. Look at the change in the Hollywood landscape as a signifier of its durability. At one point it was just one of many styles of films called 'product' that between, say, 1930 and 1970, the movie city ground out like sausages or hula hoops at a rate of four or five a week.