Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

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.

The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered

It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

After all, greatness is not for everybody

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.

Unlike modern films where superstars dominate every scene, the Hollywood films of the golden era have depth in writing and casting, so the story can resonate with more than one tone.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

"Every great film should seem new every time you see it."
Roger Ebert

It would mean a good film, the story that you have recounted to me there - but it bears no sort of resemblance to everyday life.'
'I admit that I haven't gone into all the details, but-'
'You have gone farther - you have ignored them magnificently.

Everything that is great is as rare to find as it is difficult to do.

In thinking about 'depressing movies,' many people don't realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.