Pauline Kael

tom except The Iron Lady is rank, not deserving of rank.

Granted.

Agree that The Devil Wears Prada is the best performance of the "Streep's overdue" run, but the movie lets her down by being more about Anne Hathaway's dullard of a character than about Streep's.

The Iron Lady still the strangest bad movie I've seen in years; why make a film about so contentious a figure and then have the whole thing be her stumbling around her house talking to her dead husband?

you prefer a movie about Thatcher stumbling around the White House talking to a dead Reagan?

Might be an improvement.

would've preferred a movie of her eating babies

poor, card-carrying union member babies

The Devil Wears Prada and The Iron Lady are on my never-watch list

(Pauline Kael's too, I hear)

like Julie and Julia, DWP features a decent Streep perf in an otherwise abominable movie

The Devil Wears Prada is an easy watch! Fast forward thru the Hathaway parts (Tucci's good too).

Yes! DWP so needs a Phantom Menace-style fan edit!

it's interesting how except for TIL her need-a-third-Oscar-run consists of modest to huge box office hits. I mean, like, she's a legit star now.

Not a single one of the last five movies Streep has been nominated for are really any good. (Nor are most of the rest of the movies she was nominated for, as it turns out.)

man A Cry in the Dark really is the best of those movies, isn't it?

trying to think if she's ever done a straight horror flick...? I would be into that

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.

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Reasons why I'll probably never leave ILX.