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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.

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
Rarely
Movies
Perfect
Great

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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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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Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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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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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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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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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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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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