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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

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
Movies
Movie
Easy
Art
Displaced
Persons
Sullen
Cheap
Expression

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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.
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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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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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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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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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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 slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
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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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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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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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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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