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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
Talked
Twenties
Movies
Religion
Art
Thirties
Substitute
Substitutes

More quotes by Pauline Kael

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Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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in show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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 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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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
Pauline Kael