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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.

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
Thinking
Differences
Point
Show
Business
Useful
Shows
Likes
Someone
Thinks
Much
Asking
Really
Difference

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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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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For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch.
Pauline Kael
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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.
Pauline Kael
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An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.
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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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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.
Pauline Kael
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael
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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Pauline Kael
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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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.
Pauline Kael
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
Pauline Kael
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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.
Pauline Kael