Pauline Kael

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.

i know; i think i am less of a crank than renata adler, at least. so is dr. morbs, for illustration purposes.

xp to omar

did you read Adler's essays on the Clinton impeachment? As essential as Didion's.

She also wrote the best dissection of Robert Bork's legal writings I've ever read.

i think i have read one of the adler essays on the Clinton affair. she is smarter than everyone ever, for sure.

i do really like pauline kael more now than i used to. probably years of reading shitty critics who are either too in thrall to the hollywood machine (your average mainstream writer) or too misanthropic/deadly writers (armond white) or simply cautiously treading a really boring non-committal line (most alt-weekly writers imo.) i really hardly agree with her or even when i do, we don't share the same reasons for liking the same things, but i find her really entertaining these days.

she is smarter than everyone ever, for sure.

well, no, she's not smarter than me.

Somebody got me to read her novel Speedboat once, but I remember nothing about it

Adler did sport Serious Long Greying Hair that was modish in the late seventies.

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

― Josefa

some of the most awkward complimentary prose i've read about beauty in women comes from film critics. and some of the nastiest, misogynistic disses.

otm

truth bomb-level, really

i love anthony lane's writing but i haven't completely forgiven him for his review of baby mama in which he went on and on (or so it seemed to me) about how the problem with the movie was that tina fey wasn't pretty enough to carry a lead role.

it's like there's a collective madonna-whore complex among most male movie critics.

never read that Baby Mama review. H8 that dude now.

Kael was excellent at writing about unconventional beauty in actresses: Streisand, Ellen Barkin (I think), etc. (There are other examples, I just can't remember any right now.)