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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.

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
Direct
History
Reality
Like
People
Tends
Wherever

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McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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Her only flair is in her nostrils.
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Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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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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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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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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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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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’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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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Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
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