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If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

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
Test
Tests
Hollywood
Mankind
Use
Prognosis
Tissue
Tissues

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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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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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The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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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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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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Trash has given us an appetite for art.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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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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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Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.
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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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