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Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.

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
Drive
Understand
Really
People
Nuts
Shouldn

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All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
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Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being wised up knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.
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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.
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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.
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The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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.
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At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
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