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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Pauline Kael

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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Criticism
Independent
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More quotes by Pauline Kael

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In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
Pauline Kael
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
Pauline Kael
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
Pauline Kael
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The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
Pauline Kael
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Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.
Pauline Kael
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Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
Pauline Kael
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It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
Pauline Kael
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
Pauline Kael
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Pauline Kael
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
Pauline Kael
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
Pauline Kael
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For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
Pauline Kael
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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Pauline Kael
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.
Pauline Kael
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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
Pauline Kael
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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
Pauline Kael
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
Pauline Kael