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Film Quotes

“. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.”

“I'm actually a huge fan of digital as well. I appreciate how that technology opens the doors for filmmakers who never had access to that level of quality before. However, I do think film itself sets the standard for quality. You can talk about range, light, sensitive, resolution -- there's something about film that is undeniably beautiful, undeniably organic and natural and real.”

“The film studios learned to our dismay but to their pleasure that if they spent $200 million making a film they could make half a billion on it. So they were not interested anymore in quality films... They can't afford to be that risky at those prices. Consequently you're getting a lot of remakes, sequels, dopey comedies full of toilet jokes...”

“Consider paint a film of light reflecting/absorbing material, and a colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this reflected quality 'luminance' and measure it in millilamberts. This measure is as real and present as height, breadth, depth; and I find the phenomenon equally sumptuous and convincing. . . . Painted light, not color, not form, not perspective, or line, not image, or words, or equations, is painting. I make paintings which do not represent light, they are light.”

“It's mind-boggling to consider that movies this bad are actually committed to film. The poor quality of The Pest in almost every category - humor, intelligence, creativity, and just plain entertainment value - ranks it somewhere between a bad infomercial and a local cable newscast. Rarely do I consider the act of seeing a movie to be a chore, but this kind of experience is the exception.”

“Jen came first, and then they wanted to cast somebody that would... Kevin liked the idea of having a kind of The Ghost of That Character kind of haunt the movie in a way throughout, by having Raquel look so much like her. And also, it was sort of serendipity. I mean, she was also the best actress. I mean, as you can see Raquel has a pretty appealing, engaging kind of precocious, sparkly quality that's... it was just luck really that she happened to the film.”

“One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.”

“I think television is moving more into movies, particularly with serialization and almost cinematic proportions and expectations. A show like 'Game of Thrones' is a perfect example of that, or even a show like 'The Wire,' which isn't all about instant gratification it's about inviting someone into the long experience of television the way you'd be invited into a theater for two hours. So I think in that way, and the quality of writing in television is probably much better than most film writing.”

“With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection.”