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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

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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 felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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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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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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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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Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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 first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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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.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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