Stephen Hunter Quotes

• The true mystery of the JFK assassination isn’t ‘How could the bullet go through two people with only slight damage?’ but ‘Why did the third bullet explode?’

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Mystery, Third

• The prospects for a coherent, hilarious and consistent American comedy seem to lessen every year, as the poor waterlogged, gassy corpse called ‘Evan Almighty’ proved when it floated ashore recently. So there’s a temptation to think too highly of Robin Williams’s uneven but occasionally funny ‘License to Wed.’

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Corpse, Temptation

• 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.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Culture, Missing

• The Japanese, despite the trade deficit and their ability to build fabulous automobiles, still think that a guy in a monster suit is all that is needed for a monster movie.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Trade Deficit, Build

• 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.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ground, Hollywood

• Since I’m a story-oriented critic, sometimes it’s difficult to discuss issues without defining them. At the same time, I try not to give away anything that hasn’t been given away in first half, in TV commercials, or that isn’t obvious from the set-up of the movie. My editors are aware of this tendency of mine and read carefully for spoilers.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Defining, Discuss

• ‘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.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Japanese, Turns

• ‘Pearl Harbor’ is definitely about December 7, 1941, but it is not of December 7, 1941. It’s not even really of our age, either. It has more of the feel of a film from, roughly, mid-war.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Definitely, Either

• ‘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.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Genres, Steady

• I’ve actually published two compilations, if only barely. Hire a private detective and possibly you’ll be able to locate them. One was called ‘Violent Screen,’ and the other ‘Now Playing at the Valencia.’ Bantam and Simon and Schuster.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Barely, Detective

• I’m not an expert or a trained ballistician. But it is a subject I’ve studied intently for 50 years, so I may know a thing or two. In my opinion, the JFK investigation was poorly handled.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Expert, Investigation

• I remember the early 1980s, when I first got one of these fabulous film critic jobs. The downside was sitting through ‘Splatteria III: The Dismembering of the Clampett Clan’ or ‘The Oklahoma Meatgrinder Massacre’ or some such. The headaches unleashed by watching attractive kids die week after week after week cannot be imagined.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attractive, Imagined

• I never feel so utterly fraudulent as when I review a movie whose charms impress all in the world and I simply do not get it. The other variant is that I love something the world disdains. This has had severe career consequences: I am still famous – or notorious – in certain quarters where I am recalled as the man who liked ‘Hudson Hawk.’

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Review, Impress

• I grew up in the suburbs among highly educated people, in a house crammed with books. It was a culture rich in ideas, stimulation, entertainment, and mental activity, all helpful to the nurture of an imaginative child who wanted from an early age to be a writer.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Culture, Helpful

• Considered purely as effects-driven filmed drama, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ checks in somewhere in the middle of one of Hollywood’s most absurd and least lamented dead genres, the disaster pic of the ’70s. It’s a little better than ‘Earthquake’ but not as good as ‘The Towering Inferno,’ because it doesn’t star Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Tomorrow, Towering

• 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.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Japanese, Characterize

• By my count, of the more than 600 English-language World War II movies made since 1940, only four have even acknowledged the humanity of the soldiers of Nippon. There may be a few I’ve missed, but not many.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Acknowledged, Soldiers

• But you can still find good films if you read your local film critics and are willing to drive a bit. You have to be a proactive film viewer to have the most provocative cinema life.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Viewer, Local

• 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.

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Gears, Stays

• Among our many crimes as an imperialistic exploiter of other nations’ cultures, stealing their movies ranks lower than selling them cigarettes but higher than killing their game. If you’ve seen big stupid American versions of France’s ‘Three Men and a Cradle’ or, recently, Japan’s ‘Shall We Dance?,’ you can only mutter: ‘Guilty, guilty, guilty.’

  Stephen Hunter

  Topics in Stupid

  Tags in Crimes, Lower

Stephen Hunter (30)

Birth:	25th March, 1946
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Essayist, Novelist

About

Stephen Hunter was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. After graduating from Northwestern in 1968 with a degree in journalism, he was drafted for two years into the United States Army serving a ceremonial soldier in The Old Guard in Washington, D.C., and later wrote for a military paper, the Pentagon News.

Related Authors

• John Mason Brown
• Greil Marcus
• Clive James
• Fredric Jameson
• Leslie Stephen
• James Laver
• Christopher Lasch
• Max Jacob
• Michel Foucault
• Christa Wolf

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 21st December

Births

• 1944 - Michael Tilson Thomas
• 1982 - Philip Humber
• 1918 - Kurt Waldheim
• 1957 - Ray Romano
• 1948 - Tom Keith

Deaths

• 1992 - Stella Adler
• 1889 - Joseph Barber Lightfoot
• 1958 - Lion Feuchtwanger
• 1935 - Kurt Tucholsky
• 2001 - David Swift