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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
Movie
Easy
Art
Persons
Displaced
Sullen
Cheap
Expression
Movies

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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.
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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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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 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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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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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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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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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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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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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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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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