Pauline Kael

we're coming to get you, pauline. (my favorite shelley winters/bette davis movie)

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4dszj4xkU1qa0rqvo1_500.png

Pair of fun gals prove movie pans aren't just for kaelites anymore! :-)

is that a Gumby doll sticking out of Didion's hair?

whatevs. didion looking totally i'd wear what she's wearing: style icons of our lives in that pic

adler reminds me of robin gibb

http://s11.allstarpics.net/images/orig/m/a/mahwjj1zgobdmdhg.jpg

didion looking pimp there, adler has a bit of

http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsS/15426-12196.gif

lol yeah

i was thinking emma thompson tbh

scheider's way better tho

she does look like thompson though! inexplicable hair; she'd probably stare disdainfully at me for that observation and i'd crumble to dust.

in the first pic she looks like a college professor, albeit a decent-looking one who will sleep with you (and then still give you a C+!)

she does look like thompson though! inexplicable hair; she'd probably stare disdainfully at me for that observation and i'd crumble to dust.

― horseshoe, Friday, November 4, 2011 12:10 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

it was probably a hot look in the 70s

she probably reeks of Parliament cigs.

First pic reminded a little bit of
http://www.thetruevinerecordshop.com/www/francoise%20hardy%20image%2025.jpg
but yeah with Roy Scheider thrown into the mix.

Joan didion is a babe and fuiud

i read the adler piece and then her wiki cuz i was wondering if the nyrb essay was in part due to intra-newyorker stuff and she has a son born in 86!!!!

loled @

Sometimes, the “you” seems the subject of a hypnotist: “You feel that you understand everything that’s going on.” “You don’t feel embarrassed by anything that Clint Eastwood does.”

I just don't see the motivation. What led Adler to devote 7 million words to an attack on Pauline Kael? Did the world need one?

i think the existence of articles like barra's retroactively justifies adler's piece.

i think this bit is priceless:

A more important, related stratagem recurs constantly in her work, and by no means in hers alone. I don’t know how to characterize it, except as the hack carom—taking, that is, something from within the film and, with an air of intellectual triumph, turning it pointlessly against the film or a performer. “Gere looks like Robert De Niro without the mole on his cheek,” for instance, “but there’s more than that missing.” More than the mole.

I think I've been clear about how highly I regard Kael; I've got Renata Adler's collection of movie reviews, and what I read of it didn't compel me to read more. Having said that, I don't see Adler's piece as any less justified than Kael's attack on Sarris and the auteur theory. Kael's writing upset her, so she wrote about it.

i figure kael could handle it well, right? even if she was shocked by it. a lot of that piece is lol and pretty spot-on.

my recollection is the the entirety of her public response was to say "i'm sorry ms adler doesn't like my work" and no more -- but maybe with the biog and all there's more to know

PK wasn't into feuds; as far as i know she only wrote about sarris in 'circles and squares,' and refused to respond to any of his subsequent attacks on her (which were generally vicious and personal in a way that her own piece was not).

Yeah, I was going to say: I think anybody has the capacity to have your feelings hurt when you feel you've been blindsided, but I can't imagine Kael reacting the way Sarris did to "Circles and Squares," letting it linger for years, up to and including his obituary for Kael (which, as I wrote upthread, I do understand, if I try to see the whole episode through his eyes). I'm sure she shrugged it off quickly.

there were a few interviews toward the end where she said something like "i think rennie a was pissy over the fact that i expanded the allowable amount of 'voice' in the ny'er" but that was about it.

also i got no problem with adler popping shots at kael. just that she did it at such exhausting, pedantic, convoluted, repetetive length.

oh, i meant to post this before: list words that kael used that no one else ever does

1: logy <--- not a word! but she uses it lots (well two or three times over 25 years but i reread her lots)

how is "logy" not a word?

I'm pretty sure I've heard David Letterman use "logy"! On TV!

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/logy

It is a word here, meaning "dull, lethargic." Chambers says it is "Chiefly US"

In one of her last interviews Kael sounded genuinely puzzled and sad that Sarris never wanted to talk to her again.

how do you pronounce it? i've never encountered it anywhere else! to be fair i never actually tried looking it up, i think i passed it off to myself as a weird new-yorkery way of spelling "loggy" (ie like a log) (= dull and lethargic i guess,. since logs are generally both)

it's the fact that no one else ever seemed to use it that struck me, obviously there's lots of US-only and UK-only words

i wouldnt have been surprised if she was hurt about the adler piece, in private. sarris' attacks are easier to dismiss as butthurtness; adler came at her all cold and rational like a nerdy terminator

it's a normal word here! LOW-GHEE

maybe, if they'd ben friends or if she had time for alder's writing: in my experience writers always have a big list of other writers they quietly consider total idiots, and if an idiot attacks they just find it basically silly and funny

ok you;re all saying this but NONE OF YOU EVER USE IT! i suspect a trap

lisa simpson uses it

also i got no problem with adler popping shots at kael. just that she did it at such exhausting, pedantic, convoluted, repetitive length.

qft

Albert Goldman was busy writing something else.

i mean christ, being a workaday critic may be stupid, and kael may fall into all the traps that make being a workaday critic stupid, but based on this essay there's no reason for me to follow Adler into the light.

lisa simpson doesn't count: none more paulette

'my only friends are grown-up nerds like gore vidal. and he's kissed more boys than i ever will.' -- lisa simpson

PK wasn't into feuds; as far as i know she only wrote about sarris in 'circles and squares,' and refused to respond to any of his subsequent attacks on her (which were generally vicious and personal in a way that her own piece was not).

according to kellow (I've read about a third of the bio now), pauline took regular pot-shots at other critics in her published essays before she reached the new yorker. "mr. shawn" (whom she called bill) insisted she cease & desist. she almost sounds like jim derogatis in kellow's description, trying to make a splash w/gratuitous attacks on other critics

the robin gibb/renata adler comparison nearly strangled me, had to suppress my real-life LOLz so as not to wake up the family

when adler's hit piece came out in the 80s i dutifully tried to read her novel speedboat and [insert nautical metaphor] didn't get too far

i can't stand didion's novels but i like her journalism

i'm tempted to argue that there's a built-in clash here, of professional ethos: critics and journalists and novelists -- if they're true to their calling -- can't quite have compatible value systems, same as lawyers and policemen tend to despise one another (we need/pay all of them to clash on our behalf)

on the one hand, i think that's true, but on the other hand i think there can be be good critic/novelists. it must be really hard, though, and involve a lot of compartmentalizing. i guess some people would call themselves good journalist/novelists, but those people's journalistic ethos is kind of fucked imo. by "those people" i basically mean truman capote.

didion is kind of a critic, isnt she? a "cultural critic"? her journalism is of the... critical variety. and she certainly had opinions about movies!

yeah she would be an example to me, but i like her novels. mark s does not ;_;

i like dfw's updike review

bellow has a buncha good essays but i can't remember if any of them are criticism