Sunday, August 11, 2013 – At the Movies
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood. ~ Walt Disney
Film spectators are quiet vampires. ~ Jim Morrison
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country. ~ Clint Eastwood
It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it. ~ Andy Warhol
Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them. ~ Katherine Dunn
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance- or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies. ~ Pauline Kael
Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. ~ Jean-Luc Godard
A film is a petrified fountain of thought. ~ Jean Cocteau
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award. ~ Billy Wilder
I don’t take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache. ~ Bette Davis
Give me a couple of years, and I’ll make that actress an overnight success. ~ Samuel Goldwyn
Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo. ~ Mary Pickford
Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped. ~ Luis Buñuel
Film lovers are sick people. ~ Francois Truffaut
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. ~ Terry Pratchett
It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. ~ Anthony Burgess
Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. ~ Werner Herzog
If I’m going to write a book every American will want to read, it’s got to have lots of pictures. Those pictures must also move, and all the words in the book must be spoken and available audibly for all the readers to hear as they watch. ~ Jarod Kintz
I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me). ~ Martin Amis
Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema! ~ Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge
I was feeling rational and restless, which is horrible for watching movies. ~ Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith
It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks. ~ James Jones, From Here to Eternity
In America, film is the highest form of art that the public aspires to. People will come to me and say ‘Oh, your book was so good, they ought to make a movie out of it!’ To which I reply “Well, why? It’s already a book.” ~ Orson Scott Card
The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That’s why we go to movies and say, “Oh, the book is better.” ~ Paulo Coelho
In New York I’d go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I’ve upped it to six or seven, mainly because I’m too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It’s not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it’s just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we’ve agreed to lower the bar. ~ David Sedaris
If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job. ~ Woody Allen
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. ~ Jean-Luc Godard
Just Above Sunset 