Pauline Kael

Struggling to see how it could be as entertaining as Sontag & Kael.

Also just saw LOA is releasing a Kael collection, and I guess I don't know how it could be that diff from For Keeps.

I liked Sontag & Kael a lot, but if the writer's good, I think this'll be great. It'll fill in lots that I don't know about her life pre-"Circles and Squares" (I know next to nothing), and, I would hope, would dive right into all the Kael/Sarris/Simon/Macdonald sniping through the '60s. I'm counting the days.

would prefer if Brian Fellows wrote a book on Kael

Dwight Garner's too brief reevaluation of Hooked, my second favorite Kael collection.

From the piece above: "wondering what she’d say if she were alive to weigh in on, say, Black Swan or The Social Network. (I suspect she’d have smacked both around, while finding things to enjoy about David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s work in the Facebook movie.)"

"What would Kael think?" follows me in and out of every movie theatre. I think the guy's right about The Social Network--my guess is she would have loved Timberlake most of all.

She would've said that Mara Rooney was like the new Roz Russell or something.

Todd McCarthy's review of the new bio (some dish about her early life via the book, and TMc's own).

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/pauline-kael-a-life-dark-243280

The Library of American edition is redundant if you already own For Keeps.

Even to close friends, Pauline revealed little about her early family life. Many did not even know she was Jewish

find this hard to believe!

doesnt sound like there's much new info in that bio

The comment by one "Terry" has made me curious about Penelope Gilliatt's crit; she wrote the Sunday Bloody Sunday screenplay.

okay well this i want to read more about: ... Penelope Gilliatt, whose drunken excesses are startlingly detailed.

I remember reading Gilliatt's reviews just as regularly as Kael's back then, but no idea what I'd think of them now.

Didn't know Pauline chased gay boys as a young woman.

curious to read more about her pre-NYer career (i've heard a few of her radio broadcasts)

xpost With a bat?

An interview with All About All About Eve wag Sam Stagg from '82:

http://books.google.com/books?id=olNSliMdOHYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=kael+conversations&hl=en&ei=3iCOTsuhO9GztwesxMimDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

* Staggs

She confronts the homophobe slur.

i have that book + was reading it on the can last week. she always had a minor blind spot re: this stuff - she was very sensitive about how jews were portrayed in movies, but tended to wave it off a bit whenever blacks or gays found something distasteful

the Staggs int'vw is not on GoogleBooks btw

It is. Click on "Bisset, Jacqueline" in the index.

books.google.com/books?id=olNSliMdOHYC&pg=PA91

I know. I think Kael abused gays no more severely than she did any other group.

for which I'm grateful

well except for the "ambiguous" Archie Leach

Never got through that specific article (little interest in the subject), but didn't she gush about how he was too, um, straight for anyone to accept "I just went gay all the sudden" as anything other than ludicrous?

She almost went postal watching I Was a Male War Bride.

The thing I remember most about Gilliatt's reviews (there was a collection I would look through at the library) was that they weren't even remotely like Kael's. That, and the plagiarism incident.

gilliatt's review of '2001' is readily google-able. it's excellent, and certainly engages with the film more interestingly than kael did.

Andrew O'Hehir discusses PK w/ Matt Zoller Seitz:

I appreciate what she represents and her influence on the craft and form of film criticism, mine very much included, is almost oxygen-like. But I’m not really on her wavelength. Even when I agree with her about certain movies or directors I often don’t see them the same way, and don’t really get what she’s talking about. I’ve honestly never known what she means by “humanist” movies, and I don’t understand her passion for, say, Brian De Palma or James Toback. Such weird and ultimately minor choices! And the way she uses the first-person plural or the second-person plural, to implicitly include the reader in her highly eccentric emotional response — that drives me nuts. It’s manipulative and a little creepy, like she’s saying all right-thinking people will have the same opinion about a motion picture....

As we’ve discussed, her definition (of film) excludes all kinds of things, from European art cinema to horror movies to a lot of crime films and other genre movies. What troubles me about her legacy is the anti-intellectual component you have mentioned, the idea that Kael provides cover for the persistent critical devaluation of movies that challenge her definition of “movies” because they do not set out to please or entertain millions of people, and may be unsettling or incomplete or unfriendly on purpose.

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/pauline_kael_hero_or_hack/singleton/

I really wish guys like him could appreciate her just as a writer. Who cares whether they share tastes?

Hero or Hack?

impossible choice let me think about it

i agree. i always read her for the writing. agreeing with her was beside the point for me. i don't agree with most critics about a lot of things.

but, you know, its fair game to criticise her for being blind to stuff or intellectually sloppy or whatever. but when people basically say: "she was too opinionated!" that seems silly. then again, by pointing out stuff that she didn't write about...i dunno, what's the point of that? maybe she thought she wouldn't write about them well or in an interesting way.

a lot of it is sexism too. if she had been a dude she would have been hunter thompson or something. posters of her in brainy dorm rooms. (i actually had a picture of her on my wall when i was like 19 lol nerd)

and that dude above saying that he didn't see things the same way when he watched a movie...that's kinda the point to me. how could you see things the same way? seeing things in different ways is the fun of critical debate, no? sorry, i'm being obvious. i mean, she bugs me too.

you guys should read the full piece. it's better than the piece morbz excerpted (more nuanced)

and to state the really obvious: none of the people i've read who have written about her is anywhere near as good a writer as her. which is why people still talk about her. and don't talk about pretty much any other film critic of her era. other than, like, james agee, would any other american film critic get a bio written about them? maybe whatshisface, manny farber. and maybe an ilxor will write the definitive ebert bio.

and by other writers writing about her i mean other critics that i have read. film critics and other kinds.

Completely agree that her writing is why to read her, not her taste. But her taste is interesting anyway, because she was smart and interesting and so even when she was "wrong" from your point of view, she's still wrong in interesting ways. Which is way better than being right in boring ways.

Also, am I wrong in thinking that she's increasingly little-known among people under 40? I've gotten a lot of "who?" looks from smart, educated people in recent years when her name comes up.

Very good piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/roaring-at-the-screen-with-pauline-kael.html?_r=1&mid=516298&ref=books&pagewanted=all

(xpost: "Ask moviegoers under 40 who she is, and you may draw a blank"!)

'film criticism' isn't very mainstream, I don't think it has anything to do with her personally. how many people in their 20s could name a book critic? an art critic? etc.

Ask moviegoers under 40 who Howard Hawks is, and you may draw a blank.

The progression of time: not always a bad thing.

tom carson's is the best review of the bio I've read so far

http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/Pauline-Kael-A-Life-in-the-Dark/ba-p/6021

there's a bit of "inside baseball" but that comes w/the kaelian territory

Like anything else, I think it depends on whether you're talking about writers or (for lack of a better term) the general audience. I'm sure that anyone in his or her 20s who writes about pop music is aware of, and has quite likely read, Christgau, Marcus, Bangs, etc.; those in their 20s who consume the music that the others are writing about, no. Ditto young film writers vs. film-goers.

yeah i think tom carson wins. that's a good one.

that thing about the second-person is true though, it is kind of pushy and she uses it all the time

Along the way Landberg and Kael married. It didn’t last long — “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman,” Landberg says

lol

I think I already knew Kael's writing-as-sex act betrayed a largely uninteresting actual-sex life. Kindred spirit strikes again.