I Lost it at the Movies Quotes

“Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“An artist must either give up art or develop.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“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.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. Macdonald believes that "a work of High Culture, however inept, is an expression of feelings, ideas, tastes, visions that are idiosyncratic and the audience similarly responds to them as individuals." No. The "pure" cinema enthusiast who doesn't react to a film but feels he should, and so goes back to it over and over, is not responding as an individual but as a compulsive good pupil determined to appreciate what his cultural superiors say is "art." Movies are on their way into academia when they're turned into a matter of duty: a mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is. In this country, respect for High Culture is be­ coming a ritual.
If debased art is kitsch, perhaps kitsch may be re­ deemed by honest vulgarity, may become art.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness).”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965

“The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomenon, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors.”
― Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965