Quotes About Entertainment

When you think about it, going to the movies is bizarre. Hundreds of strangers sit in a blackened room, elbow to elbow, for two or more hours. They don't go to the toilet or get a smoke. Instead, they stare wide-eye at a screen, investing more uninterrupted concentration than they give to work, paying money to suffer emotions they'd do anything to avoid in life.

Superficial knowledge leads to a bland, monotonous telling. With authorial knowledge we can prepare a feast of pleasures. Or at the very least, add humor.

A revered Hollywood axiom warns: "Movies are about their last twenty minutes." In other words, for a film to have a chance in the world, the last act and its climax must be the most satisfying experience of all. For no matter what the first ninety minutes have achieved, if the final movement fails, the film will die over its opening weekend.

an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly

In comedy laughter settles all arguments.

Victims love entertainment. Victors adore education.

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

It's fun to be amazing, to be the star of the show, to have everyone watching you—even if you have to act like a pig.

I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.

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

Entertainment is about the way things should be. Art is about the way they are.

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Of that one, I wrote: "Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.

Siskel's Saw. It's amazing how many movies are not as interesting as a documentary of the same actors sitting around talking over lunch. GENE SISKEL

One of my delights in these books, on the other hand, has been to include movies not often cited as "great"—some because they are dismissed as merely popular (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark), some because they are frankly entertainments (Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Rififi), some because they are too obscure (The Fall of the House of Usher, Stroszek). We go to different movies for different reasons, and greatness comes in many forms.

Siskel's classic question, "Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

The movie has, above all, effortless charm. Once we catch on that nothing much is going to happen, we can relax and share the amusement of the actors, who are essentially being asked to share their playfulness.

Saturday Night Fever was Gene Siskel's favorite movie, and he watched it at least seventeen times. We all have movies like that, titles that transcend ordinary categories of good and bad and penetrate straight to our hearts.

Finding success in a Michael bay film is like finding the Virgin on a slice of toast, but less rewarding.

We got two gold-record singers and they don't sing? So? We got five Oscar-winning actors and they don't need to act much.

You fellows are amazing,' the sweaty cook roared over the stoves. 'Everything happens to you only. Each time you come here, you have a new adventure story to entertain us

The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip character

In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one's suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

The most unbelievable scene in any action movie was the part where Tom Cruise jammed the thumb drive into the slot and it slid in on the first try.