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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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