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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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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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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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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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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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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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Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.
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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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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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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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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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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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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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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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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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Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
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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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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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