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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
Comparative
Younger
Task
Tasks
Necessarily
Critical
Truly
People

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once.
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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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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.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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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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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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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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