Quote

tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.

Pauline Kael

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Least
Movie
Tasteful
Colossal
Basically
Movies

More quotes by Pauline Kael

Image
It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
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
Image
McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
Pauline Kael
Image
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
Pauline Kael
Image
Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael
Image
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
Pauline Kael
Image
When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.
Pauline Kael
Image
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.
Pauline Kael
Image
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Pauline Kael
Image
Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
Pauline Kael
Image
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
Image
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
Pauline Kael
Image
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
Pauline Kael
Image
For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion now B movies are a substitute for religion.
Pauline Kael
Image
An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.
Pauline Kael
Image
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
Image
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
Pauline Kael
Image
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
Pauline Kael