Pauline Kael

"a talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings" isn't wrong though!

It's not wrong, but it's kind of damning with faint praise.

Tarkovsky and Fassbinder both tiresome bores

granted the only Fassbinder I've tried to watch was Berlin Alexanderplantz

that's deep, Shakes.

at least they're both dead

http://www.inspiredcardandgift.co.uk/images/graphiccontribution.jpg

The strawman awakes

all that heaven allows is a very weird movie. jane wyman bums me out in a big way. blah.

do guys really want me to go in on Berlin Alexanderplantz cuz I will

xp

when was the last time anyone watched a lina wertmuller movie?

do guys really want me to go in on Berlin Alexanderplantz cuz I will

I didn't get past the third episode but he's got 15,000 other movies in every genre, so man the fuck up and start watching.

heck, when was the last time someone watched a roberto rossellini movie? actually i could kinda go for one right about now. he made so many movies that i've never seen.

You might actually like World on a Wire, Shakey. It's got some Jerry Cornelius stuff going on.

Not really, but you still might like it.

Shakey really raising rongness to new heights lately.

Lotsa people watched Rossellini after reading this:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/roberto-rossellinis-war-trilogy/1653

looks like World on a Wire is not available in the US...?

i think i have still never seen any rossellini films

shakey it just had a theatrical run in certain cities (its first US one, i think? it was made-for-tv), i imagine criterion will be putting it out soon since janus distro'ed it

Too bad you're not Jonathan Rosenbaum, Shakey.

i would buy that war trilogy set if i ever saw one. i doubt i'll see one around here anywhere, but you never know. i might have to go to the dreaded newbury comix in northampton.

I watched Germany Year Zero a few years back and was bummed out for days.

Did she ever change her mind about anything in later life and realized that she had missed something,

offhand i can't think of a notable example mentioned in the bio. maybe. she placed tremendous importance & pride on only seeing movies once, tho

did any of her interviewers ask her about this?

there's something in afterglow about it

she says in 'raising kane' that she liked 'kane' much more on a second viewing (this was three decades later, of course).

controversial!

kael's dependence on her immediate gut reactions reminds me of the famous story about columbia pix president harry cohn & citizen kane screenwriter herman mankiewicz

Cohn started the conversation with: "Last night I saw the lousiest picture I've seen in years." After mentioning the title, one producer reported that he had seen it with an audience and they had loved it. He suggested that maybe Cohn would have had a different reaction if he had seen it with an audience. Cohn replied, "That doesn't make any difference. When I'm alone in a projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it's bad. If my fanny doesn't squirm, it's good. It's as simple as that." There was a momentary silence, which was broken by Mankiewicz. "Imagine," he said to the other members of the table. "The whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

I think I read that this was the film whose dreadfulness made her throw in the towel in '91:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102004/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4axKyzyUrw

Lem Dobbs -- screenwriter of the Kael-killing film Morbs links to there -- is also (a) son of the proto-PopArt painter R. B. Kitaj; (b) a respected British film historian; and (c) screenwriter of three Soderburgh projects (Kafka, The Limey and Haywire). Kafka was made the same year as the Kael-killer -- I have it on VHS, but never watched it beyond a quick scan, as a lot of it's too dark (as in light-lacking) to screen well on a TV, and I always lose patience. Aggravating thread-derail ends.

From Francis Davis' interview that became Afterglow:

FD: I assume that the Parkinson’s was the reason you retired from The New Yorker.

PK: That, plus the fact that I suddenly couldn’t say anything about some of the movies. They were just so terrible, and I’d already written about so many terrible movies. I love writing about movies when I can discover something in them—when I can get something out of them that I can share with people. The week I quit, I hadn’t planned on it. But I wrote up a couple of movies, and I read what I’d written, and it was just incredibly depressing. I thought, I’ve got nothing to share from this.

One of them was of that movie with Woody Allen and Bette Midler, Scenes from a Mall. I couldn’t write another bad review of Bette Midler. I’d already panned her in Beaches. How can you go on panning people in picture after picture when you know they were great just a few years before? You have so much emotional investment in praising people that when you have to pan the same people a few years later it tears your spirits apart. And Woody Allen didn’t deserve to be as bad as he was in Scenes from a Mall. I don’t feel great enthusiasm about his recent movies, but I thought parts of Husbands and Wives were quite stunning. I loved Judy Davis. But nothing of his that I’ve seen since has really excited me. You can’t explain some of these things, except that it’s the wrong material, the wrong costars, everything goes wrong in a movie when something goes wrong, and it’s just too damn depressing to spend your life writing about that.

Plus Mall was a Paul Mazursky film, and she loved him too

J-Ros reviews Hoberman's 60s book and has something to say about PK: http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=26674

Shouldn't Rosenbaum at least mention in passing that he once co-authored a book with Hoberman (Midnight Movies, a good one)? Unless I missed it.

Emerson on Kael and criticism's evaluating technique, which then spreads into that Taylor essay.

can anyone imagine Kael reviewing an Apichatpong film?

Some good points in that essay -- more than I want to defend here, to be honest -- but anyone who's read Kael's evaluations of, say, Ophuls or Bunuel will get the discussion of "mise en scene" that Emerson implies she avoided.

Besides this Self-Styled Siren post and its comments section (both of which allude to Jim Emerson) addresses all this.

Excellent:

http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/article/pauline-kael-a-life-in-the-dark-review-extended

I finished the bio a couple of nights ago. M. Coleman's B+ upthread is fair--I liked it more than that, but you do have to have a tolerance for a lot of review excerpts/summaries once she lands at The New Yorker. I didn't mind that--as all those famous '70s movies that have become associated with her appear one after another, they write a parallel story of their own. I think it's as balanced as could be hoped for from a fan--and wouldn't want to read if he weren't. Like Lopate, I found the end of the story sad. I hope Sarris is well enough (and has the inclination) to write about it somewhere. I'm really curious as to whether he'd take a step back from the harshness of his obituary

well, she gave up men by 40 -- sounds like some people on other threads.

“As Gina often pointed out, Pauline liked to be surrounded by people whose feelings about the arts and politics were close to her own. She often told friends that she found it difficult to form a close bond with someone who disagreed with her about more than three movies.”

and thus her friends began obsessively to keep ledgers

The paradox was that someone who had such quick access to her emotional responses could be so clueless about her effect on others

One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is where Nixon confirms to Peter Bogdanovich (as Kael speculated he would in her review) that he liked The Last Picture Show. I don't have the book with me, but it's something like, "Black and white? Texas? I did like that!"

Apparently he shocked Boggo and Cybil Shepherd by speaking knowledgeably about the movie for a few minutes. Then he turned to Shepherd. "Who were you?"

"I was the one who took her clothes off, Mr. President."

Awkward pause. "You have a brilliant career ahead of you" (or something)

yes that was Bog's account. "I remember you very well Miss Shepherd" lol Dick

Too bad Bogdanovich didn't stick more closely to the novel:

"Who were you?"
"I was the one who had sex with the blind heifer, Mr. President."
"You have a brilliant career ahead of you, son."

The best review of the Kellow bio I've read.

She never denied that some directors – Griffith, Renoir, De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Godard – were masters, and she never genuflected before a movie just because she’d loved the director’s previous work. She adored Altman’s work but she hated every movie he turned out between Nashville in 1975 and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean in 1982. She adored Peckinpah’s work but not Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid or The Getaway, De Palma’s but not Obsession, Scarface or The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Generalizations simply don’t work on Kael, because one of her great qualities as a critic was that she weighed every movie on its own merits and could see it in all its aspects – a virtue that links her to James Agee, the signal movie critic of the forties, whom she much admired. So when Kellow argues that she thought moviemakers did their best work when they were young and energetic, you think, Well, except for John Huston, Kon Ichikawa and Luis Buñuel, and how about De Sica’s return to greatness with The Garden of the Finzi-Continis? And when he puts forward the theory that she had a Magellan complex, that she found it easier to get behind filmmakers she’d discovered, you think, Well, except for Renoir and Preston Sturges and the German Expressionists. She was notoriously – and too many, not just publicists, exasperatingly – unpredictable because she didn’t believe the movies themselves could be predicted. So while she was unkind to David Lean’s epics, she loved several of his early, smaller pictures (Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Hobson’s Choice) and she shocked everyone by giving his last, A Passage to India, a rave.

Two that I'd add to the list of major surprises would be Herbert Ross's Pennies from Heaven and Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon--she crucified Midnight Express. I do imagine her rave (somewhat measured, as I remember it) for A Passage to India was at least partially tied in with memories of how the New York critics had treated Lean at a 1970 dinner--they pounced on him in unison over Ryan's Daughter--and Lean's subsequent absence for the next decade-and-a-half, supposedly because he was so hurt by the experience. Also (and I think the passage you've excerpted is excellent, and basically agree with everything the writer says), if the implication is that Sarris loved every film by his favourite directors, I don't think that's true; if you go through the appendix of of The American Cinema, you'll see lots of fluctuation in where he ranks individual films by his favourites in the year-by-year lists. He's more consistent than Kael, no argument, but I wonder if that isn't partly a function of the fact that Sarris's auteur favourites mostly directed in the studio era, where (Welles an obvious exception) assembly-line consistency was part of the environment, while so many of Kael's favourites directed in a era where spectacular belly-flops were the norm. Films like Quintet just didn't happen--weren't allowed to happen--as often in the '30s and '40s, and the wild swings of Kael's '70s writings reflected that reality.

Here's Kellow himself interviewed by CBS News:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7386191n