Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions, or reading a bad book for the dirty parts. Optical wizardry is something a movie can do that a book can’t but it is no substitute for a story, for logic, for meaning. It is ornamentation, not substance. In fact, whenever a science fiction picture is praised overeffusively for its special effects, I know it’s a bad picture. Is that all they can find to talk about?
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) Russian-American author, polymath, biochemist
“Editorial: The Reluctant Critic,” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (12 Nov 1978)
(Source)
Writing about Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Quotations about:
movie
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The whole of life is just like watching a [film], he thought. 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 all out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.
Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. … What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) English film director
In François Truffaut, Hitchcock, ch. 4 (1968)
Sometimes paraphrased as "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
