Pauline Kael

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.

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.

I started to suspect that the reason my subject’s prose can feel tiresome after a while stems from the fact that it contains a paradoxical quality: vibrancy verging on closed-mindedness.

It is true that I can only really read Kael in pretty small doses these days.

I really want this--a friend has a chapter, along with Paul Schrader, Joan Tewkesbury, Allen Barra, and another 20 or so people--but the price is crazy: $75 on Amazon, before shipping and exchange. Even if I bought e-books, which I don't, that cost almost as much.

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/kael_zpsajk9uvdz.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/Talking-about-Pauline-Kael-Filmmakers/dp/1442254599/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442637816&sr=8-1&keywords=talking+about+pauline+kael

someone has made a short film about the arthouse she co-created (in Berkeley, right?):

http://www.docnyc.net/film/ed-pauline/#.VkS697erR9M

Twitter site, seemingly related to an upcoming documentary (What She Said).

http://twitter.com/WhatSheSaid_Doc

Funny, in a sideways way; the almost-50th anniversary of a review of a film getting some 50th-anniversary attention.

http://flavorwire.com/609140/bonnie-and-clyde-pauline-kael-and-the-essay-that-changed-film-criticism/amp

In the middle of a move and trying to downsize my book collection somewhat. But For Keeps, Conversations with Pauline Kael, A Life in the Dark and Sontag & Kael are all coming with me.

dump em all for The American Cinema :D

It seems weird now that Bosley Crowther's original B&C pan came out four months before the film did

dump em all for The American Cinema :D

Have you read that thing recently? Zzzzzzz.

Kael: stimulating and so frequently wrong.

Josefa:

B&C played the Monreal fest in April; Crowther's last line in his review was "This is the film that opened the Montreal International Festival!" So either he went or had it sneaked for him.

It was regularly released in August. Kael's piece was published in October (apparently it had been turned down by the New Republic before the New Yorker ran it).

PK did not go fulltime at TNY til '68.

Don't know if you have Reeling, Eric, but that's the one regular collection I'd keep.

Her collections were hard to find even used on Amazon until a couple years ago; I guess a proto-Eric dumped his load. I bought , Reeling, Taking it All In, and State of the Art.

They're expensive now. I had an extra hardcover of State of the Art, one I bought a few a years ago, relatively cheap and in perfect condition, that I gave to a friend recently. "If you find out you already have it, I want it back--it's worth something."

I have all the original hardcovers up to Reeling, mostly bought a long time ago. Was wondering if all her stuff came out in HC; if State of the Art did I guess they all did

I still have State of the Art and Taking it All In, and will likely keep them too.

Kael: stimulating and so frequently wrong.

Sarris: boring and right only about as often as average for film critics (and somewhat responsible for lists)

tsk tsk

How much (pre-1984) Sarris have you read that's not in TAC? He hasn't been collected like Kael.

(Also, he was especially good on silent and screwball comedy, so I'm probably barking up the wrong tree...)

To be fair, I haven't read a lot of Sarris' Voice stuff that hasn't been collected in other anthologies.

I love Sarris' You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet.

Doesn't Confessions of a Cultist have most of his 1960s stuff?

I found a remaindered copy of the Renata Adler collection After the Tall Timber the other day and re-read her Kael piece. It's something...many posts about it above.

I've gotta quote this from Michael Wolff's preface, though:

But the rightness of Adler's view of Kael as nasty, self-promoting gasbag only became more obvious as Kael's reputation disappeared after she lost her New Yorker post and power. She was unreadable, said Adler; and indeed, Kael is unread now.

He wrote that in 2015.

Whatever you think of her, "Kael is unread now" is a truly bizarre assertion. Only four years removed from the biography and The Age of Movies, no less.

"How could Kael be read? - nobody I know reads her."

lol michael wolff