Pauline Kael

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.

where can you find her old reviews?

Some stuff here:

http://rockcriticsarchives.com/links/paulinekael.html

Otherwise...

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=pauline+kael&x=0&y=0

hmm.. so complicated

I'll just ask siri to read her reviews to me

Needless to say, most of those Amazon prices are absurd. Used copies aren't as commonplace as they were 20 years ago, but I still see them around fairly regularly.

I liked the Siren's write-up of the bio.

Think I'm more interested in reading the Wolcott book than the Kael biography, tbh.

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

uh yeah the contempt seems personal enough that I can't really take his dismissal of her Debra Winger and DePalma fanship seriously.

man kael really got some guys nuts in a twist, didn't she

i mean nothing will top sarris' eulogy but i'm amazed how desperate a lot of male critics are to send her ghost a condescending pat on the head

she was better. must hurt their ego. nobody ever ran home to read an owen gleiberman review.

nobody ANTICIPATED one of his reviews. or any of those other guys reviews.

Came away from Carson's piece realizing more than ever that cutting DePalma off at the knees is merely the simplest means for (I guess) rejected Paulettes to scrape what's left of themselves off of the bug zapper.

And that it's no doubt a lot easier to appreciate the material that pre-dates their own interactions with Kael.

(Still a good read otherwise.)

i read sarris for years in the voice when i was a kid and very little of it stuck with me. which is fine if you are just looking for a good movie to see on friday night.

Love it how SSS spells it out: "In between she pursued an ill-judged taste for relationships with gay men, and had a daughter, Gina, whose father refused involvement in her upbringing."

The mix of condescension and reign-resentment...it's like she was a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Stalin to these people.

xpost also, LOL at David E. in the comments: "Triumph of the Will & Grace marriage"

okay, i like that siren thing too. that siren person says everything i was thinking much better than i could. kudos to the siren. i never knew about the siren. now i know.

jesus, i mean we live in a world where david denby still writes film reviews. its just not fair...

For the most part, I stayed home in the apartment that I loved. And instead of going out, I entered in that summer of 1999 a dark and empty tunnel, an enclosure illuminated along the walls by a flash of naked men and women. I had discovered porn on the Internet. In the solitude of night, and in my little study at home, where mighty volumes of Plato, St. Augustine, Hegel, Montaigne, Nietzsche hardly my regular reading but a recent obsession loomed over the desk, the kneeling young women awkwardly turned their eyes to the camera. They often had long and beautiful hair that they must have laboriously cared for; they looked for approval not from their partners but from the camera, which I thought was the true object of their desire. They wanted to be seen. And the men, ugly and strong, sullen, tattooed some of them, thick-membered, concentrating on their erection and their orgasm, lest they lose either they were amateurs, not models, exercising the democratic art form of exhibitionism, with me as their willing audience. They all wanted to be seen, but I didn t want to be seen.

that should be his obituary.

i hope the times has that on file.

For a sec, I was sure that was David E.

Not as lengthy as everything linked to thus far, but a friend of mine posted something on the biography yesterday:

http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2011/10/pauline-kael-a-life-in-the-dark.html

It's not such a big deal that she demonstrated what Fassbindder meant to her by ignoring him altogether; it's more important that she defended Joseph Ruben thrillers.

*Fassbinder