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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new

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
People
Comparative
Younger
Task
Tasks
Necessarily
Critical
Truly

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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
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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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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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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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