Pauline Kael

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.)

she was excellent at writing about the role pysical attraction plays in film viewership in general. her "man from dream city" essay about cary grant is super-otm.

that reminds me of when ellen barkin was on piers morgan a few months ago and the dude was such a horny creep to her. i mean dudes who are writing about film or into film or dealing with actresses certainly feel they have carte blanche to make it known that they want to fuck them.

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/perilsofbeingpauline.html

Davis: There are a few other things I wanted to ask about you and Shawn. Everyone knows he objected to your use of what he considered crude language. But did he ever think that something you said about an actor or director was too cruel? Like when you described Dyan Cannon as “looking a bit like Lauren Bacall and a bit like Jeanne Moreau, but the wrong bits”?

Kael: Dyan Cannon roared over that one, I’m happy to say. She’s a very smart, very lively woman, and she was very sweet about it. I don’t recall if Shawn objected to that, but that was the sort of thing he often did object to. I sometimes gave in, because I thought maybe he was right. You know, sometimes you leave out things that seem part of the story you’re telling, because you don’t want to hurt people. That makes sense.

Yeah, Kael was best when she described how a star's sex appeal turned her on (i.e. Sean Connery).

Part of the frustration of her second-person usage is that when she drops the faux-universalization of her reactions, it's terrific.

I remember this old Tom Snyder Playboy interview where he said the only guest he ever openly drooled over was Liv Ullmann. Tom Snyder, highbrow cineaste.

btw you can find some long PK things including "Raising Kane" on that site:

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael.html

In 1980, upon the release of her New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael's collection When the Lights Go Down, she published an 8,000-word review in The New York Review of Books that dismissed the book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless,"[3] arguing that Kael's post-sixties work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility," and faulting her "quirks [and] mannerisms," including Kael's repeated use of the "bullying" imperative and rhetorical question. The piece, which stunned Kael and quickly became infamous in literary circles,[4] was described by Time magazine as "the New York literary Mafia['s] bloodiest case of assault and battery in years."[5]

lol, i gotta read that

oh, its online!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/aug/14/the-perils-of-pauline/#fnr3

i love kael, but i think that adler piece is kind of a masterpiece in its own right. i don't think i've ever seen any writer's quirks shredded quite so effectively. i gotta read more adler.

To the spectacle of the staff critic as celebrity in frenzy, about to “do” something “to” a text, Ms. Kael has added an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.

adler otm

and christ, that allen barra piece is annoying as shit with his complaints about the biography 'second-guessing' some of kael's views. we get it, you knew pauline kael and you think she was right about everything. critics who don't just try to ape kael's style but also manage to parrot her every last opinion (charles taylor was a particularly awful offender) are so pukeworthy.

yes, taylor could be terrible and really adopted her nasty side

I used to love reading Barra on baseball in the Voice, but I found the Kael piece fawning too.

man i hadnt actually read that adler takedown until earlier this week. (i guess they put it up because of all the recent kael-related books?) she makes some good points -- the stuff not specific to kael, especially; the chunk about about the limitations and burn-out of "reviewing" versus writing essays was painfully (from a personal standpoint) otm -- but jesus what a windbag.

I think by her late work there was evidence of burn-out -- she was still fighting battles she'd long-ago won (haha except the general acceptance of the peerless awesome that is b.de palma etc) -- but some of her best writing and reviewing is in WtLGD, and Adler's "authoritarian" argument is a bit teenage. ("She strongly dissed a film I love, it's like HITLER WROTE THIS REVIEW!")

some of her best writing and reviewing is in WtLGD

I like her bits on Angela Lansbury and Ingrid Bergman playing grand dames.

trying to read that adler article and holy shit, paul stanley or lou reed could sum up those first few paragraphs in like a sentence

was adler being paid by the comma?

There may well be some good points in here, but it's hard to dig through the accusations of Kael being a columnist whore