Pauline Kael Quotes

If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.

De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.

Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) — Not bad. It may fall into the general category of youth-exploitation movies, but it isn’t assaultive. The young director, Amy Heckerling, making her feature-film début, has a light hand. If the film has a theme, it’s sexual embarrassment, but there are no big crises; the story follows the course of several kids’ lives by means of vignettes and gags, and when the scenes miss they don’t thud. In this movie, a gag’s working or not working hardly matters — everything has a quick, makeshift feeling. If you’re eating a bowl of Rice Krispies and some of them don’t pop, that’s O.K., because the bowlful has a nice, poppy feeling. The friendship of the two girls — Jennifer Jason Leigh as the 15-year-old Stacy who is eager to learn about sex and Phoebe Cates as the jaded Valley Girl Linda who shares what she knows — has a lovely matter-of-factness. With Sean Penn as the surfer-doper Spicoli — the most amiable stoned kid imaginable. Penn inhabits the role totally; the part isn’t big but he comes across as a star. Also with Robert Romanus, Judge Reinhold, Brian Backer, and Ray Walston. The script, by Cameron Crowe, was adapted from his book about the year he spent at a California high school, impersonating an adolescent. The music — a collection of some 19 pop songs — doesn’t underline things; it’s just always there when it’s needed. Universal. color (See Taking It All In.)

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

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.

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

If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.

where there is a will there is a way .

for Dunaway, constantly kneeling or sprawling to take photographs, her legs, especially her thighs, are far more important to her performance than her eyes; her flesh gives off heat. Tommy Lee Jones is the police lieutenant who represents old-fashioned morality, and when the neurotically vulnerable Laura, who has become telepathic about violence, falls in love with him, they’re a very creepy pair. With the help of the editor, Michael Kahn, Kershner glides over the gaps in the very uneven script (by John Carpenter and David Z. Goodman, with an assist from Julian Barry). The cast includes Raul Julia, Rose Gregorio, Meg Mundy, and Bill Boggs (as himself). Columbia. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he’s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together.

An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course - making tricks out of what was once done for love.

Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money — and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist’s intentions" you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.

The happiest screen collaboration of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton — they're both wonderful — is in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, "The Vessel of Wrath." It's set on an island in the Pacific, which Maugham calls Baru, and it's concerned with the efforts of the prim missionary (Lanchester) to reform the carnal, ribald beachcomber (Laughton). The situation is the reverse of that in Maugham's Sadie Thompson story, but with a light, comic tone. The Hepburn-Bogart "African Queen" probably took a few notions from it.