Pauline Kael Quotes

118 Sourced Quotes

Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.

Pauline Kael
Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.

Pauline Kael
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.

Pauline Kael
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
You don't have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.

Pauline Kael
One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.

Pauline Kael
The Night Porter is said to be a runaway hit in Italy and France and to have made a big star of Charlotte Rampling, but surely one twinkle doesn't make a star.

Pauline Kael
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.

Pauline Kael
One's moviegoing tastes and habits change — I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live — for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we're tired of.

Pauline Kael
Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate.

Pauline Kael
Movies have been doing so much of the same thing — in slightly different ways — for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.

Pauline Kael
Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it's a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That's what they go to burlesque for.

Pauline Kael
If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies.

Pauline Kael
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.

Pauline Kael
Rain Man is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes.

Pauline Kael
I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have.

Pauline Kael
Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they're being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.

Pauline Kael
To lambaste a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge.

Pauline Kael
Meryl Streep just about always seems miscast. (She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.)

Pauline Kael
Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated.

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
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

Pauline Kael
Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided.

Pauline Kael
It's an ugly, stupid instant movie [You Are What You Eat] made by people who substitute promotion for talent and technique. It's the aesthetic equivalent of mugging the audience.

Pauline Kael
Being able to talk about movies with someone—to share the giddy high excitement you feel—is enough for a friendship.

Pauline Kael
I still don't look at movies twice. It's funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it's different. People respond so differently to the whole issue of seeing a movie many times. I'm astonished when I talk to really good critics, who know their stuff and will see a film eight or ten or twelve times. I don't see how they can do it without hating the movie. I would.

Pauline Kael
Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.

Pauline Kael
There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.

Pauline Kael
There is a dreadful discrepancy between Michelangelo's works and the words put into the mouth of Charlton Heston, who represents him here, and this picture — which is mostly about a prolonged wrangle between the sculptor and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who keeps sweeping into the Sistine Chapel and barking, "When will you make an end of it?" — isn't believable for an instant.

Pauline Kael
The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.

Pauline Kael