Pauline Kael

Closest she got was probably The River Wild. Or Mamma Mia.

*rimshot*

I love that photo of Kael writing on a legal pad in the Longworth piece, all her books on the first shelf next to her head.

Kael on A Cry in the Dark:

"Streep has seen that Lindy's hardness saves a part of her from the quizzing and prying of journalists and lawyers-that she needs her impersonal manner to keep herself intact. (From time to time, Streep suggests the strong emotions that Lindy hides in public, and we feel a bond with her-we feel joined to her privacy.) There are wonderful night scenes of the search for the baby in the blackness around Ayers Rock, in the Outback, and the movie is never less than gripping. But Schepisi, who worked on the script with Robert Caswell (it's based on John Bryson's study of the case, Evil Angels), put together more elements than he could develop. The film is like an expanded, beautifully made TV Movie of the Week. Streep seems to be playing a person in a documentary."

It's a movie that could be longer, yeah – not something I'll admit often.

I think I'd actually be more interested in reading Kael's thoughts on various actors and actresses today--McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, etc. (I'm sure there are better examples)--than directors.

From that Kellow bio, on OK's life when she ran an arthouse in Berkeley in the late '50s:

“With the house on Oregon Street, Pauline at last had a real workspace where she could spread out and be genuinely productive. Where the two front rooms divided, she set up a movie screen and constantly ran 16 mm films on a giant projector. She wrote at a drafting table, often standing up, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Wild Turkey in the other, with her favorite Bessie Smith records playing. She stayed up late at night, reading obsessively and scribbling articles to submit to The Partisan Review.”

*PK's life

Driving home today, thinking about PSH and Almost Famous, and how that was turned into an unlikely film--essentially, one about rock criticism--and how he was also in Moneyball, a film about (at least it was supposed to be) sabermetrics, I started wondering if Brian Kellow has been approached about using his book as the basis for a movie. I bet he has--every potential property gets snapped up by someone, right? I’d love to see a film about Kael’s life. Ninety-nine out of 100 times I’d want a documentary, but weirdly, this is one instance where I’d want to see someone play her. It strikes me as such a perfect life for a film. It would probably end up pleasing no one and angering many, and it could well be an awful idea. But if you pulled it off, I can imagine a great film there. Her voice-in-the-wilderness years, taking on Sarris, the Sound of Music dust-up, the Last Tango and Nashville furors, going out to Hollywood, etc.--there’s so much there. If the idea appalls you, I understand.

So: who would play her? Yes--I see Meryl Streep plain as day. Unless they signed up the woman on SCTV who did her so well. (Not Andrea Martin, who also played her--it was someone else.)

A period biopic about a film critic -- imagine the bidding war.

Streep as Kael only if its a comedy.

i don't see kael's life particularly working on the screen - the period that would most involve directly communicating with people is the time in hollywood, which would just be her waiting to meet with Beatty and having frustrating talks with James Toback. It's not like you can pad out the last third of a movie with quotes from her reviews like Kellow did his book.

I'm sure Streep would be down for a Mommie Dearest style version, though.

And there's gotta be more than a dozen potential writer-editor relationships that could be filmed with higher stakes than kael-shawn.

I think there'd invariably be lots of comedy in there. Kael trying to get "fuck" by William Shawn, or trying to sell him on a Deep Throat review. John Cassavetes picking her up off the ground. Kael sitting in a movie theatre cat-calling and making a nuisance of herself, Cape Fear-style (they could even have her with "Love" and "Hate" tattooed on her knuckles).

It's gold, Jerry.

write it up and call rachel dratch

That's the spirit. I've already e-mailed Kickstarter, Kellow, and half a dozen known Paulettes.

they'll wait to see how the Ebert doc does

They could end the trailer w/Kael shouting "I'm going to the movies!" @ the Celine & Julie press screening.

one of her finest hours

Unless they signed up the woman on SCTV who did her so well. (Not Andrea Martin, who also played her--it was someone else.)

Mary Charlotte Wilcox

and man, the fights that are gonna break out in the Cedar Rapids AMC tenplex over that scene, hoo boy

xp

Watch, they'll change it to her saying it at The Towering Inferno or something.

she walked out of something shouting "Life is too short!"

The film opens in 1998, with Wes Anderson's pilgrimage to see Kael. He says something that triggers a memory, flash back to San Francisco in the '40s. (Soundtrack: fade in "Gimme Shelter." After that great joke on the Silence thread, I think every film for the rest of time should begin with "Gimme Shelter.")

Imagine all the did-this-really-happen? incidents that could be worked into the story. She's watching Barbara Jean sing "Dues" in Nashville, and the notices the woman in front of her crying. People accost her on the street as to what movies are worth seeing, and she gushes over The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Melvin and Howard, and the Ritz Brothers at a rep theatre. She's sitting with a bunch of kids--why, we don't know--and they all tell her that North to Alaska is much better than Rio Bravo. If Streep were to play her, it'd be like a Charlie Kaufman movie hearing Meryl Streep bemoan how boring Meryl Streep is.

I think PSH would have made a good Sarris circa 1963.

So: who would play her? Yes--I see Meryl Streep plain as day. Unless they signed up the woman on SCTV who did her so well. (Not Andrea Martin, who also played her--it was someone else.)

― clemenza, Monday, February 3, 2014 5:37 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

jeannie berlin?

what years is this film gonna cover? Jeannie Berlin is 64. I was hoping we'd get some of the James Broughton period.

Jeannie Berlin is forever Lila in The Heartbreak Kid to me, so I can't get my head around her--Lila was simpering and needy and not very Kael-like.

Film starts in the '40s, covers right up till her retirement in 1991, plus the Wes Anderson lead-in a few years later. So two or three Kaels might be required, like with the Apu Trilogy.

Or do a Palindromes/I'm Not There thing with a revolving cast of six or seven Paulines.

I'm Not There, yes. With Robert Downey, Jr. as the mid-'70s cultural superstar.

Surprisingly difficult to think of anyone besides Streep for this.

Like clemenza, thinking of Streep in Adaptation... also thinking that a movie like this perhaps calls for Charlie Kaufman.

To do a film about an iconic film critic seems to call for a meta-film.

surprisingly easy to think of anyone but Streep playing Robert Downey, Jr.

Nicole Kidman as RDJ

OK, Mia Wasikowska as a young PK

again

http://www.wnyc.org/i/620/372/c/80/photologue/photos/April%202012_Rachel%20Dratch.jpg

This may have already been posted here, but I love this interview (circa 1979, I'm guessing) that Scott recently posted to Rock Critics. Her discussion of Catholic filmmakers is particularly interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUmUnLMWYQ

1982, it says. This is wonderful. First new Pauline footage I've seen in years.

show all messages (1194 of them)

Reasons why I'll probably never leave ILX.

there are a great many critics who are just trying to get through the day: who know they're second-rate, and are scared of their editors, and scared of their readers, and scared of the movie companies--and with some justification--but are never good enough to conquer their fears ... if you're not good enough, then you're at the mercy of everybody. and you have to give in.

^^^ intensely otm

lol @ her awesome umbrage when she's called "impressionistic"

"women would say to me, your review was like a legal brief ... and i would wince at that. but men would always say how impressionistic it was."

Googling Kael-Kiarostami led me to this, something I'd never read before:

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-cordial-enmity-of-joan-didion-and-pauline-kael

Quick writeup and trailer for upcoming Kael doc, What She Said:

http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/watch-trailer-for-pauline-kael-documentary-what-she-said-20150515

How many film critics are going to get their own docs?

Doorman: The Legend of Armond White

How many film critics are going to get their own docs?

inversely proportional to the number of critics getting daily newspaper gigs

Odd that 2001 and The Birds show up in the trailer--every other clip seems to be a film she loved, or something close to that.

shes the type of critic i think id rather see a biopic of some sort for... like a film based wholly on the critic in birdman.

Ditto, as I mentioned in another thread--I think it'd potentially make a great film.

preview of Cineaste article on her "provincialism"

Being Polish myself, and recognizing the fact that Kael’s parents were both Polish Jews who immigrated to the United States from Warsaw in the first decade of twentieth century, there is one particular absence in her writing that I find particularly glaring: namely, the films of Central and Eastern Europe.

It is almost shocking to discover that, in her quarter-century as a film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael had only once reviewed a film that can even remotely be deemed Eastern European, since, although it was nominally a West German production, it was made by a Hungarian director and produced by a Hungarian studio: namely, István Szabó’s Oscar-winning Mephisto (1981), which she had mixed feelings about. As far as we know (and I base my knowledge on several interviews I did with Kael’s acquaintances and friends, as well as on Kellow’s book), she never traveled anywhere behind the Iron Curtain and one would be hard-pressed to detect so much as a tiny bit of interest in this part of the world in her writing. In fact, whatever mentions of Eastern Europe do appear in her reviews, they are usually derogatory and anxiety-driven, as if Eastern Europe represented something shriveled, dry, and vaguely repugnant: definitely not a place one would identify with, even though one was not even a full generation distant from the geographical heart of it.

http://www.cineaste.com/hooked-and-gridlocked-michal-oleszczyk

She didn't review Fassbinder, Ozu, or Wadja either.

nope

It doesn't particularly bother me. I don't see travel as requisites for good writing. The better point to make is why she remains a good film writer despite her weaknesses.