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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.

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
Religion
Art
Thirties
Substitute
Substitutes
Talked
Twenties
Movies

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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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 our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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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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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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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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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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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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 this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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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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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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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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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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What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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