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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

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
Bred
Cynicism
Knees
Generation
Generations
Television
Wisdom
Political

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.
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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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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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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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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 critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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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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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