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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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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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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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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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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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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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.
Pauline Kael
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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
Pauline Kael