Pauline Kael > Quotes

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
― Pauline Kael

“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.”
― Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies

“Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.”
― Pauline Kael

“A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is. ”
― Pauline Kael

“Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.”
― Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Film Writings, 1965-1967

“Her only flair is in her nostrils. ”
― Pauline Kael

“The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.”
― Pauline Kael, Going Steady: Film Writings, 1968-1969

“An artist must either give up art or develop.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically.”
― Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Film Writings, 1965-1967

“When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.”
― Pauline Kael

“An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course - making tricks out of what was once done for love.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“where there is a will there is a way .”
― Pauline Kael

“A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Part of growing up is developing a bullshit detector, and kids usually do a pretty fair job of wising each other up.”
― Pauline Kael, Movie Love: Film Writings, 1988-1991

“TV accustoms people to not expecting much.”
― Pauline Kael, Taking it All In: Film Writings, 1980-1983

“We don't have time to catch up with the future that is here.”
― Pauline Kael, Going Steady: Film Writings, 1968-1969

“There's no way I could make the case that Animal House is a better picture than Heaven Can Wait, yet on some sort of emotional-aesthetic level I prefer it.”
― Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies

“Ice Station Zebra is terrible in such a familiar way that at some level it's pleasant. We learn to settle for so little, we moviegoers.”
― Pauline Kael, Going Steady: Film Writings 1968-1969

“Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way past that. Whites are unbelievable to him.”
― Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down: Film Writings, 1975-1980

“Nobody really controls a production, now; the director is on his own, even if he's insecure, careless, or nuts.”
― Pauline Kael, Taking it All In: Film Writings, 1980-1983

“Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)—This New York-set thriller operates on mood and atmosphere and moves so fast, with such delicate changes of rhythm, that its excitement has a subterranean sexiness. Faye Dunaway, with long, thick, dark-red hair, is Laura Mars, a celebrity fashion photographer who specializes in the chic and pungency of sadism; the pictures she shoots have a furtive charge—we can see why they sell. Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film has a few shocking fast cuts, but it also has scabrous elegance and a surprising amount of humor. Laura’s scruffy, wild-eyed driver (Brad Dourif) epitomizes New York’s crazed, hostile flunkies; he’s so wound up he seems to have the tensions of the whole city in his gut. Her manager (René Auberjonois) is tense and ambivalent about Laura—about everything. Her models (Lisa Taylor and Dar-lanne Fluegel), who in their poses look wickedly decadent, are really just fun-loving dingalings.”
― Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

“The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomenon, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“The first prerogative of any artist, in any medium, is to make a fool of himself.”
― Pauline Kael

“Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness).”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)—Not bad. It may fall into the general category of youth-exploitation movies, but it isn’t assaultive. The young director, Amy Heckerling, making her feature-film début, has a light hand. If the film has a theme, it’s sexual embarrassment, but there are no big crises; the story follows the course of several kids’ lives by means of vignettes and gags, and when the scenes miss they don’t thud. In this movie, a gag’s working or not working hardly matters—everything has a quick, makeshift feeling. If you’re eating a bowl of Rice Krispies and some of them don’t pop, that’s O.K., because the bowlful has a nice, poppy feeling. The friendship of the two girls—Jennifer Jason Leigh as the 15-year-old Stacy who is eager to learn about sex and Phoebe Cates as the jaded Valley Girl Linda who shares what she knows—has a lovely matter-of-factness. With Sean Penn as the surfer-doper Spicoli—the most amiable stoned kid imaginable. Penn inhabits the role totally; the part isn’t big but he comes across as a star. Also with Robert Romanus, Judge Reinhold, Brian Backer, and Ray Walston. The script, by Cameron Crowe, was adapted from his book about the year he spent at a California high school, impersonating an adolescent. The music—a collection of some 19 pop songs—doesn’t underline things; it’s just always there when it’s needed. Universal. color (See Taking It All In.)”
― Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

“for Dunaway, constantly kneeling or sprawling to take photographs, her legs, especially her thighs, are far more important to her performance than her eyes; her flesh gives off heat. Tommy Lee Jones is the police lieutenant who represents old-fashioned morality, and when the neurotically vulnerable Laura, who has become telepathic about violence, falls in love with him, they’re a very creepy pair. With the help of the editor, Michael Kahn, Kershner glides over the gaps in the very uneven script (by John Carpenter and David Z. Goodman, with an assist from Julian Barry). The cast includes Raul Julia, Rose Gregorio, Meg Mundy, and Bill Boggs (as himself). Columbia. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)”
― Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

“Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. Macdonald believes that "a work of High Culture, however inept, is an expression of feelings, ideas, tastes, visions that are idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as individuals." No. The "pure" cinema enthusiast who doesn't react to a film but feels he should, and so goes back to it over and over, is not responding as an individual but as a compulsive good pupil determined to appreciate what his cultural superiors say is "art." Movies are on their way into academia when they're turned into a matter of duty: a mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is. In this country, respect for High Culture is be­ coming a ritual.
If debased art is kitsch, perhaps kitsch may be re­ deemed by honest vulgarity, may become art.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Meserve and Clark and one of the other men feel like conquerors when they take Oahn away with them. They act out their own war fantasy; they feel it's a solider's right to seize women for their pleasure.”
― Pauline Kael, The Best Film Ever Made