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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
Substitutes
Talked
Twenties
Movies
Religion
Art
Thirties
Substitute

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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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