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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

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
Pauline Kael
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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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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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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.
Pauline Kael
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Pauline Kael
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael