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

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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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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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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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