Pauline Kael Quotes
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TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.
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It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
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Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.
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Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace - made me expect the worst.
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If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?
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When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.
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This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. When Dunbar has become a Sioux named Dances with Wolves, he writes in his journal that he knows for the first time who he really is. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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The words 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,' which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.
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It's as if Brian de Palma were saying, 'What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?'
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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
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Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.
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Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials - which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.
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Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid - I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity - a poetic comedy that's really funny.
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The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art - the expressive use of techniques - it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either.
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Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)
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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it - not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.
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If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.