Pauline Kael - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)

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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
In show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.

Pauline Kael
When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message — the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby.

Pauline Kael
Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.

Pauline Kael
For some moviegoers, movies probably contribute to that self-defeating romanticizing of expectations which makes life a series of disappointments. They watch the same movies over and over on television, as if they were constantly returning to the scene of the crime—the life they were so busy dreaming about that they never lived it.

Pauline Kael
Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're 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 Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful — our own innocence.

Pauline Kael
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. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.

Pauline Kael
The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.

Pauline Kael
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose—selling—that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.

Pauline Kael