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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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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Watches
Watch
Perhaps
Television
Used
Something
Selectively
Always
Turned
Americans

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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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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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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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 you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
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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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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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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This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
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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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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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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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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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