Pauline Kael - Deeper into Movies (1973)

10 Sourced Quotes

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The vacuity of the Ross Hunter-George Seaton ten-million-dollar Airport has the dull innocence of an accounting error.

Pauline Kael
A steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

Pauline Kael
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.

Pauline Kael
The movie [Song of Norway] is of an unbelievable badness; it brings back clichés you didn't know you knew — they're practically from the unconscious of moviegoers. You can't get angry at something this stupefying; it seems to have been made by trolls.

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
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
Tasteful and colossal are — in movies, at least — basically antipathetic.

Pauline Kael
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
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
Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers.

Pauline Kael