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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

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
Perhaps
Statement
Movies
Italian
Briefest
Movie
Appeals
Imaginable
Actors
Statements
Poster
Words
Kiss
Posters
Basic
Bang
Kissing
Bangs
Saws
Appeal

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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.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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.
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in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.
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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion now B movies are a substitute for religion.
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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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