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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
Perfect
Great
Rarely
Movies

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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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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 the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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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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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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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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I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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