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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
Wisdom
Political
Bred
Cynicism
Knees
Generation
Generations
Television

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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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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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