Quotes by Pauline Kael

“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.”

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

“The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”

“Trash has given us an appetite for art”

“A mistake in judgment isnt fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is”

“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”

“Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldnt go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because theyre so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lots wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.”

“Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him Plays with Camera.”

“In this country we encourage creativity among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow too much.”

“Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.”

“The unwary Brando was made to look public ass No. 1. It was now open season on Brando.”

“Just about the best Hollywood musical of all time.”

“The shooting of the movie is the truth part and the editing of the movie is the lying part, the deceit part”

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.

An artist must either give up art or develop.

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.

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

...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.

The worst thing about movie-making is that its like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.