Trash, Art, and the Movies  

"It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take himself too seriously—like the comic moment when the gliding space vehicles begin their Johann Strauss walk; that is to say, when the director shows a bit of a sense of proportion about what he’s doing, and sees things momentarily as comic when the movie doesn’t take itself with such idiot solemnity. The light-show trip is of no great distinction; compared to the work of experimental filmmakers like Jordan Belson, it’s third-rate. If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they’ve put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art."--"Trash, Art, and the Movies" (1969) by Pauline Kael

"I did have a good time at Wild in the Streets, which is more than I can say for Petulia or 2001 or a lot of other highly praised pictures. Wild in the Streets is not a work of art, but then I don’t think Petulia or 2001 is either, though Petulia has that kaleidoscopic hip look and 2001 that new-techniques look which combined with “swinging” or “serious” ideas often pass for modern picture art."--"Trash, Art, and the Movies" (1969) by Pauline Kael

"Sconce, in his original article, noted a few predecessors to the phenomenon he was exploring: ... whose 1969 article “Trash, Art and the Movies” extolled the AIP exploitation picture Wild in the Streets as a much more relevant ... We should note that there is a different way of describing paracinema which in fact precedes the use of the term by Sconce, but which has not gained such widespread currency."--Cult Cinema: An Introduction (2012) by Ernest Mathijs and ‎Jamie Sexton