Pauline Kael

i was wrong. just looked. they still have it on amazon and elsewhere.

which great book of interviews, scott?

yeah i feel the same way. kinda got my fill of wolcott/kael with his vanity fair piece but now i think i do actually want to read it. i was also a really big fan of nyc in the 70's. kinda my favorite place to be in the 70's.

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Pauline-Kael-Literary/dp/0878058990

this one.

though amazon u.k. might be more your speeeeeed.

oh, never read that -- i see there's a francis davis "last conversation" also, think i have a kael binge coming on

I thought for sure I had that interview book, but I don't see it on the shelf, just Afterglow. I'll have to order that. I've got the Stanley Kauffmann book in the same series (probably why I confused them):

http://www.amazon.com/Conversations-Stanley-Kaufmann-Literary/dp/1578065666/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1320269083&sr=8-8

I highly recommend the Davis book. For reasons that baffle me, Greil Marcus hated it.

intra-paulette envy :)

where does davis write these days? he was a contributor when i edited wire but i lost touch with him when i left

Dunno. I did sit in front of him and TG at the Film Forum a while ago. He was still writing about jazz at the Voice last time I checked.

i used to talk to francis at a record store a friend of mine owned in philly. he lives in philly. i have to say, he didn't know me AT ALL, and he was extremely positive and really inspirational to me at the time. i had just started writing for chuck at the voice and he -francis- gave me some much needed confidence when i needed it. i read his books years before because of my dad the jazz cat.

Yeah, I used to know some guy who worked in that record store with him.

i have three of FD's books -- the great one on blues and two of the collections -- and i think that i feel that he's more acute and insightful on jazz than he is on film (where he always very eloquently seemed to be saying what other people were also all saying) (though that was somewhat a major problem in film-writing in the 90s, now that i think of it); he was lovely to work with, and i has editor-contributor lunch with him once when he was visiting london, though i don't recall a thing we talked about

s/b i can has editor-contributor lunch

That blues book was really good.

Scott - didn't mean to pick on you, btw, and I've been reading Raymond Durgnat this week so looking for more collected writing on film. Manny Farber is one of my favourite writers who was so open to everything (or at leats that is how Negative Space reads to me, although I am guarded about collections), and you go on a journey w/that book. One of my faves of all time!

I'm fine for people to be critical of things I like, but as long as they aren't cranky about it. Just the fact she wasn't open at all to some things does annoy. I want an angle (positive or negative) on something I've seen.

The Didion-Kael thing is funny, because I swear just a week ago or so I was wondering what they thought of each other. (I guess just prompted by them both being in the culture-press a lot the past month.) Not at all surprised by the enmity. They each seem like a kind of person the other would find irritating. Their writing, their approaches to the world, are so different.

Oh and while we're on the subject of Francis Davis, I'll just say I just bought and read one of his jazz collections and loved it. Have not read his film writing.

two complete opposite prose stylists yet they're both native californians of roughly same generation, fascinated by the movies

Yeah I was trying to think of the right metaphor to contrast them. Fire and ice is too cliché. Maybe something like, river and sand.

microwave oven and refrigerator

one's lou reed, the other is metallica

Mitt Romney and GOP primary voters.

skrillex and kode 9

it makes complete sense to me. her dissing of didion. kael was a foe of preciousness or what she saw as preciousness. which is different from a delicate touch which she could certainly be a fan of. and she had her own battle of the sexes going on too. there were definitely women who rankled her in a way that a lot of men (characters/types) didn't. i think i identified with her years ago in her distaste for what she might have considered unearned self-importance. (her disdain for cassavettes and bergman for instance) since that time i have reconsidered my own views in that i no longer feel that anyone earns anything ever and can fake or feign any damn thing they want and if it is compelling i don't care how they arrived at it or what path they took. i'm a big fan of spiritual short-cuts. it saves time. suffering is for the birds.

i was always a fan of didion's dead-eyed gaze and valium haze in fiction. but i was also a big fan of valium back then. and, for the record, though i saw her point, i always loved cassavetes because i would happily watch gena rowlands standing still for two hours and i would also happily watch peter falk stand still for two hours and for that matter i could happily watch john cassavetes stand still for two hours. and if they are actually moving i could watch them for four hours or more.

i was gonna say. peter falk, at least, should be muttering to himself for those two hours.

peter falk on stage alone in compete improv mode would have been top ten movie for me if it had happened. it should have happened.

oh man -- Kael is worth reading just for her head-scratching over Cassavetes films.

i just saw a crazy peter falk movie a couple weeks back that i'm sure everyone knew about already. now i can't remember the damn title. alan arkin was in it too.

this thread is definitely gonna drive me back to the well. gonna have to dig out the old battered paperbacks. but that's fine with me.

the in-laws?

I enjoyed Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club; he's the best of The New Yorker's house intellectuals. But the querulousness with which he approached her in that essay mark mentioned annoyed me; he was flabbergasted over the idiosyncrasies that every critic who's reviewed her in the last two weeks has lingered over.

or big trouble. the 80's movie.

Serpentine.

in big trouble you get to see cassavetes direct my hero beverly d'angelo.

Big Trouble is a fucking mess. I'm pretty sure Cassavetes hated it and possibly didn't even want to do it. It's not even given fleeting mention in that 3+ hour doc on the man that comes with the Criterion set.

I can't see a link above to this Allen Barra piece:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/01/pauline-kael-what-made-her-a-movie-genius.html

I don't think this is framed accurately: "...while the review collections of John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, and, let’s say it, Renata Adler, are long forgotten." Don't know about Adler, but Kauffmann's and Simon's books were never as high-profile as Kael's. Are they forgotten by the people who did buy and read them? Not by me--as I've written many times, I value Kauffmann's books from the '60s through the '90s just as much as Kael's (and was influenced by him almost as much). My guess would be that most people who paid attention to Kauffmann and Simon then would still be inclined to group them together with Kael and Sarris. For the many more people whose sole connection to film criticism was Kael, then yeah, Kauffmann and Simon never existed, not now and not then.

I agree. I have several of Simon's and Kauffmann's collections, plus collections by Adler, Sarris, Richard Schickel, Judith Crist (signed!), Manny Farber, Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, and Rex Reed. Every one of these people has unique insights. Whenever I see a movie from the '60s or '70s I'll run through the indexes of my books and compare reviews of that movie. Sometimes Kauffman has the best review; sometimes it's Rex Reed. Simon and Reed are probably the funniest writers of the bunch. The Renata Adler book I have - did she do more than one? - covers 1968-69 when she wrote for the NY Times and is terrific & won't be forgotten by me.

"the test of time"

I appreciate some of Simon's insights but, boy, is he high off the crack of his ass. Also, I don't know whether to blame his learning English as a second language for the polysyllabic atonalities in his prose.

Looking forward to watching this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DGEMBaOBSU

The way Simon describes actresses physically has never made any sense to me.

Sometimes Kauffman has the best review; sometimes it's Rex Reed.

o_0

Renata Adler is in the tradition of Ellen Willis: a superb feminist writer. Her collection Canaries in the Mindshaft is one of my essential books.

Nastiness and pomposity above and beyond the pale are part of the package with Simon; if that makes you recoil, he's not someone you'll want to read. Sometimes those qualities make me laugh with him, sometimes at him--but I value his writing for other reasons. No such problem with Kauffmann; I think he's one of the greatest film critics ever.

renata adler is v brilliant but omg she hates everything. doesn't she? she's kind of a crank. i mean, so am i.

horseshoe, no!

your bills are 5-2, chin up crankypants!

I agree about Simon's sometimes clunky prose (usually because he tries to jam in laughably abstruse vocabulary); thing is, Sarris's is even clunkier.