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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
Use
Prognosis
Tissue
Tissues
Test
Tests
Hollywood
Mankind

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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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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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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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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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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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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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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In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
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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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