Pauline Kael

It was included as the intro to the published Rushmore script eight or nine years ago.

Yeah, but Edelstein mentions that she was mortified when it appeared in the New York Times too.

OOH. I didn't know about this squabble.

I'm sure I've made it more than clear how much I love Kael, but I think she was completely wrong about Rushmore (to the extent that I can piece together her reaction from interviews, which seemed to be one of puzzlement). Just in general, I found I agreed with her less and less often towards the end. The quality of her writing was still great, but I found in terms of what she liked, she veered way in the direction of junk; it was almost like she discounted films that had any pretense towards seriousness. Her critics would probably say that that was always a problem with her, but at her best during the '70s, I think gave everything a fair look. I didn't feel that was true her last couple of years and in the interviews she gave after retiring. Obviously, there are exceptions--just a general observation.

I disagree. While it's true she reviewed more junk, the eighties and early nineties also produced more and more of it. Also, those 1500-word essays on forgotten junk like Club Paradise and About Last Night feature some of her best writing ever; it's as if she accepted the terms of the debate and relaxed.

'70s >>> '80 for movies, but State of the Art and Hooked are my favorites of her collections.

A bunch of junk from the '80s has aged a little bit better than many of the serious movies from the same decade.

Fat keeps.

I dont think you can say someone's 'wrong' to be puzzled by a movie - i sure as shit didn't know what to make of it (rushmore) at the time.

wasn't she famously a champion of de sica (as opposed to sariss' "male weepies") and rosellini? i didn't get the impression she eschewed seriousness

She had her blind spots (Bresson, Ozu, Mizoguchi), but so does every critic.

De Sica is sort of trash compared to Rossellini.

Oh wait, she liked Rossellini too? Color me surprised.

i thought i recalled several admiring bresson reviews...l'argent & ... joan of arc maybe?

i love all those guys

i didn't get the impression she eschewed seriousness

Early on, no--that was the point I was making. Being puzzled by Rushmore is fine; I think she's wrong not to think "Wow, that's an amazing film," but puzzlement is totally valid. I'm not a big fan of the '80s, so our thoughts on Kael are undoubtedly tied in to how we feel about the decade to begin with. At times, I thought she was amazing; her Casualties of War review ranks with anything she ever wrote.

Oh no way. The only one with which she (barely) connected was ...Country Priest. She despised Mouchette, Lancelot, etc.

xpost

that casualties of war review pissed me off because it got me to see that p.o.s. movie which i never would've bothered with otherwise

This is still a fantastic listen.

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-film-critics-gather.html

Especially because all three are so frequently ill-tempered and bitchy.

Plus, the eighties version of "seriousness" was often merely ponderous.

But maybe I should've known better anyway, knowing her history w/Depalma

xxpost (From the comments: "Kael sounds much as she did in other interviews I've heard, a sort of overly-didactic bedside nurse, explaining the symptoms of your disease with a dispassionate hauteur.")

I was about to say, "Many of those comments are typical."

Americans just hate smart people

(Plz to ignore my comment in that thread.)

thx, but there's a new non-Wayback site.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, December 17, 2010 4:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://web.archive.org/web/20061022083014/www.geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/

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Mouchette
France (1966): Drama
80 min, No rating, Black & White

Robert Bresson has made several films of such sobriety that while some people find them awesomely beautiful, other people find sitting through them like taking a whipping and watching every stroke coming. MOUCHETTE, from a Bernanos novel, is about a lonely, mistreated 14-year-old girl who commits suicide. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. In French.

that site just reprinted all the stuff in her 5001 nights at the movies book, right? Which is cool and all, but I don't think they transcribed her longer reviews.

god i'm enough of a fanboy that i shouldn't even look at this thread. any bet-hedge or tongue cluck about some movie she overrated or underrated just pisses me off unnecessarily.

yeah, those are all 5001 nights capsules. nice to have since i lost my copy, but...

I'm about to put on The Simpsons movie for my class, but in closing: no one inspires more commentary than Kael.

Richard Brody has a fairly vicious takedown of Kael on his NYer blog re: her Shoah review: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/12/shoah-at-25.html
I guess he's always had a problem with her, though now she can't answer back.

her shoah review was pretty brutal iirc

Is J. Hoberman's supposedly legendary response online anywhere?

I guess he's always had a problem with her, though now she can't answer back.

It's crazy how many people waited til she was dead to lash out. Like Sarris' whole "can't say I mourn her, she gay-baited me" thing.

Wonder what Molly Haskell thinks of that reaction.

Would be curious what anyone would think of their husband writing an obituary that starts:

The death of Pauline Kael (1919-2001) was announced on a local television-news program late on Labor Day night, as I was preparing for my first film class of the semester the next morning at Columbia. I can't say I was as saddened as I had been a few days earlier by the death of Jane Greer (1924-2001). Still, do not send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, and all that. Pauline was 82, and I am 72, and who knows when the Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal will come for me?

Andrew Sarris's Scenes from a marriage

that's some flaccid writing

Limp wrists, limp writing, stiff corpse.

Recess...I saw Molly Haskell introduce A nos amours a few months ago. She signed a book for me afterwards, and I asked about her husband. I've always had mixed feelings about Sarris, but I felt bad when she said he'd recently had a bad fall, which is obviously not good at his age.

she wasn't really someone whose taste i would ever trust but she was a good writer.

yeah, that's pretty much how i feel. really enjoy reading her stuff, but i definitely don't take her opinions as gospel.

I assume you guys mean Kael, not Molly Haskell.

I bet yr posts will suffer when you're 72.

I asked about the capsules in the first place cuz I saw she said Mickey Rooney's perf was the most 'daring' thing in B'fast @Tiffany's.

Yup--she loved Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, just like (from all reports) she openly campaigned for Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing for the New York awards that year. When it came to race, either she was pure id or she loved to provoke; she was worlds away from the oncoming political-correctness freight train.

she was better pre-new yorker imo

You mean the radio stuff, and the notes she wrote for her rep theatre...Interesting; I don't think I've heard anyone make that argument.

State of the Art and Hooked are my favorites of her collections. (upthread)

For me, Reeling by a mile. I don't know anything about literary or art criticism, just film and music, but I can't think of any critic more in sync with a specific moment that Kael was over the course of Reeling. Last Tango, Mean Streets, Godfather II, Nashville--the book is just filled with monumental reviews. There are probably a number of music critics who did their best work during punk.

That she never even bothered to review a Fassbinder film makes me think of her as a crank, if an important one.

Fassbinder was a huge blind spot. I think I came across something where she made reference to him not being for her, or something like that; nonetheless, writing for something as high profile as The New Yorker, to me she had an obligation to at least review him semi-regularly. It'd be almost--not quite--like not reviewing Godard in the mid-'60s.

Dr. Morbius disapproves of cranks.

(No comment--I just want to kind of freeze that sentence in time.)

there's a review of one fassbinder film -- 'merchant of four seasons' -- in her collection of capsule reviews. perhaps inevitably, she declares that it "isn't likable."

I read that she doesn't like Megalopolis.

Richard Brody seems to be working out his Kael problems on a therapist's couch the last few weeks:

For Kael, the “aura” of movies, its material essence, wasn’t in the original camera negative or in the film print—it was in the theatre itself. Her generation, formed in movie theatres, possessed, she thought, cinematic antibodies that protected them from TV, whereas the generation that got many of its movies from TV risked being infected with TV itself. Just as movies were undergoing an epochal shift—a shift that she herself discerned when writing about the films of Godard and about “Bonnie and Clyde”—Kael was looking backward to an earlier, unspoiled cinematic era that had been definitively lost. Thus even her ostensible narrative of progress through what she would come to consider the golden age of the seventies was fundamentally a narrative of inevitable decline, of pessimism for the future of the art as the collective and popular medium she understood it to be. Even if young filmmakers might manage to cultivate a sophisticated taste in movies amid the baleful influences of new media, she suggested, young viewers wouldn’t, and so the filmmakers would hardly have audiences to support their art. On this last point, at least, Kael may have been right.

Doubt a Brody bot would be worth anybody's time.

Aha Brody IS a bot! A humorless machine at that

She liked the sequel to the Exorcist?

Even the madness of EXORCIST II is of a special sort: the picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang's loony METROPOLIS). Some of the telepathic sequences are golden-toned and lyrical, and the film has a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic quality, (1978)

— pauline kael bot (@paulinekaelbot) October 31, 2025

Yup. She loved Boorman.

I should give it a re-watch.

I like it a lot! When I finally saw it I was like wtf this rips, what is everyone’s problem — then a little later in the film I was like hm ok I kinda get it. Not everything works (and I think there was some studio interference) but it’s a trip and it’s insane that ppl call it one of the worst films ever. The hypnotic regression scene alone (that set!)

Quite a few people will argue that the sequel is better believe it or not. Scorsese at least defended the sequel as worthy of the original (maybe even better but I can't recall if he actually specified that) and here's Dave Kehr's original review for the Chicago Reader:

Everybody seems to hate this movie, and not without good reason. But John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s shocker is a much more interesting film than the original, and Boorman deserves credit for trying out some new ideas, even if most of them backfire. Visually, it’s fascinating—sort of a blend of Minnellian baroque and Buñuelian absurdity—but the dialogue is childish, the story is incomprehensible, and the metaphysics are ridiculous. Still, an audacious failure is preferable to a chickenhearted success. More than worth a look, if only out of curiosity. With Richard Burton and Linda Blair.

And a quick search reveals that yes, Scorsese did indeed prefer the sequel too:

The picture asks: Does great goodness bring upon itself great evil? This goes back to the Book of Job; it's God testing the good. In this sense, Regan (Linda Blair) is a modern-day saint — like Ingrid Bergman in Europa '51, and, in a way, like Charlie in Mean Streets. I like the first Exorcist, because of the Catholic guilt I have, and because it scared the hell out of me; but The Heretic surpasses it. Maybe Boorman failed to execute the material, but the movie still deserved better than it got.

Something I'm almost positive I didn't know (searched ILX and no mention of it--I would have posted about it myself, I'm sure): Brian Kellow, who wrote the Kael biography a few years ago (also one on Sue Mengers that I read), died in 2018.

https://www.wqxr.org/story/brian-kellow-obituary/

I interviewed him after the book came out; very nice guy who, when I sent him some of the contentious ILX back-and-forth about his book (there's a long thread on here where I'm arguing with da croupier), seemed genuinely upset that anyone would view his book as a hatchet job.

Trying to remember what da croup's take even was

Thought about getting Kellow's Sue Mengers bio when it was on sale but I passed for some reason.

(xpost) Exactly that--that the book was a hatchet job. Made no sense to me then, makes no sense to me now.

Makes total sense to me, given his proclivities.

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