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

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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.
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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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McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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