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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

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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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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.
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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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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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 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 words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies
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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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