Pauline Kael

i didn't get the impression she eschewed seriousness

Early on, no--that was the point I was making. Being puzzled by Rushmore is fine; I think she's wrong not to think "Wow, that's an amazing film," but puzzlement is totally valid. I'm not a big fan of the '80s, so our thoughts on Kael are undoubtedly tied in to how we feel about the decade to begin with. At times, I thought she was amazing; her Casualties of War review ranks with anything she ever wrote.

Oh no way. The only one with which she (barely) connected was ...Country Priest. She despised Mouchette, Lancelot, etc.

xpost

that casualties of war review pissed me off because it got me to see that p.o.s. movie which i never would've bothered with otherwise

This is still a fantastic listen.

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-film-critics-gather.html

Especially because all three are so frequently ill-tempered and bitchy.

Plus, the eighties version of "seriousness" was often merely ponderous.

But maybe I should've known better anyway, knowing her history w/Depalma

xxpost (From the comments: "Kael sounds much as she did in other interviews I've heard, a sort of overly-didactic bedside nurse, explaining the symptoms of your disease with a dispassionate hauteur.")

I was about to say, "Many of those comments are typical."

Americans just hate smart people

(Plz to ignore my comment in that thread.)

thx, but there's a new non-Wayback site.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Friday, December 17, 2010 4:41 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

http://web.archive.org/web/20061022083014/www.geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/

?

Mouchette
France (1966): Drama
80 min, No rating, Black & White

Robert Bresson has made several films of such sobriety that while some people find them awesomely beautiful, other people find sitting through them like taking a whipping and watching every stroke coming. MOUCHETTE, from a Bernanos novel, is about a lonely, mistreated 14-year-old girl who commits suicide. Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet. In French.

that site just reprinted all the stuff in her 5001 nights at the movies book, right? Which is cool and all, but I don't think they transcribed her longer reviews.

god i'm enough of a fanboy that i shouldn't even look at this thread. any bet-hedge or tongue cluck about some movie she overrated or underrated just pisses me off unnecessarily.

yeah, those are all 5001 nights capsules. nice to have since i lost my copy, but...

I'm about to put on The Simpsons movie for my class, but in closing: no one inspires more commentary than Kael.

Richard Brody has a fairly vicious takedown of Kael on his NYer blog re: her Shoah review: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2010/12/shoah-at-25.html
I guess he's always had a problem with her, though now she can't answer back.

her shoah review was pretty brutal iirc

Is J. Hoberman's supposedly legendary response online anywhere?

I guess he's always had a problem with her, though now she can't answer back.

It's crazy how many people waited til she was dead to lash out. Like Sarris' whole "can't say I mourn her, she gay-baited me" thing.

Wonder what Molly Haskell thinks of that reaction.

Would be curious what anyone would think of their husband writing an obituary that starts:

The death of Pauline Kael (1919-2001) was announced on a local television-news program late on Labor Day night, as I was preparing for my first film class of the semester the next morning at Columbia. I can't say I was as saddened as I had been a few days earlier by the death of Jane Greer (1924-2001). Still, do not send for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee, and all that. Pauline was 82, and I am 72, and who knows when the Grim Reaper from Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal will come for me?

Andrew Sarris's Scenes from a marriage

that's some flaccid writing

Limp wrists, limp writing, stiff corpse.

Recess...I saw Molly Haskell introduce A nos amours a few months ago. She signed a book for me afterwards, and I asked about her husband. I've always had mixed feelings about Sarris, but I felt bad when she said he'd recently had a bad fall, which is obviously not good at his age.

she wasn't really someone whose taste i would ever trust but she was a good writer.

yeah, that's pretty much how i feel. really enjoy reading her stuff, but i definitely don't take her opinions as gospel.

I assume you guys mean Kael, not Molly Haskell.

I bet yr posts will suffer when you're 72.

I asked about the capsules in the first place cuz I saw she said Mickey Rooney's perf was the most 'daring' thing in B'fast @Tiffany's.

Yup--she loved Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, just like (from all reports) she openly campaigned for Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing for the New York awards that year. When it came to race, either she was pure id or she loved to provoke; she was worlds away from the oncoming political-correctness freight train.

she was better pre-new yorker imo

You mean the radio stuff, and the notes she wrote for her rep theatre...Interesting; I don't think I've heard anyone make that argument.

State of the Art and Hooked are my favorites of her collections. (upthread)

For me, Reeling by a mile. I don't know anything about literary or art criticism, just film and music, but I can't think of any critic more in sync with a specific moment that Kael was over the course of Reeling. Last Tango, Mean Streets, Godfather II, Nashville--the book is just filled with monumental reviews. There are probably a number of music critics who did their best work during punk.

That she never even bothered to review a Fassbinder film makes me think of her as a crank, if an important one.

Fassbinder was a huge blind spot. I think I came across something where she made reference to him not being for her, or something like that; nonetheless, writing for something as high profile as The New Yorker, to me she had an obligation to at least review him semi-regularly. It'd be almost--not quite--like not reviewing Godard in the mid-'60s.

Dr. Morbius disapproves of cranks.

(No comment--I just want to kind of freeze that sentence in time.)

there's a review of one fassbinder film -- 'merchant of four seasons' -- in her collection of capsule reviews. perhaps inevitably, she declares that it "isn't likable."

there are probably a number of music critics who did their best work during punk.

are you comparing punk with seventies American film? It's fine if you do. I no longer think the seventies were the high watermark of American film (just like I'm not inclined to say the same about punk and music).

are you comparing punk with seventies American film?

No, although in terms of quality and excitement, that works for me; I was just comparing a critic being perfectly matched to a moment. (I realized I knew just enough about art criticism to say that Clement Greenberg and Abstract Expressionism is an example of what I mean.)

the essays in i lost it at the movies are incredibly well-argued -- there's a review of the movie version of 'billy budd' where she makes a really interesting argument about the 'point' of melville's story that i've never seen anyone else make -- and very tightly written. i think it's still her best book. 'circles and squares' is an incredible essay, in large part because she holds back on the put-downs and concentrates on argument.

her reviews never lost that sharpness, obviously, but her later attempts to write at essay-length -- all those pieces where she bemoans the cowardliness of the directors, or the boringness of the audience, or whatever -- just seem like a bunch of short reviews strung together.

i think kael's biggest weakness as a critic (i don't think she has many as a writer) was her unwillingness to revisit movies, which gave her a somewhat skewed perspective about a lot of older films -- i wonder if she would have been so quick to proclaim "the fury" better than all of hitchcock if the hitch films had been fresher in her mind.

"Circles and Squares" is a masterpiece--so devastating, that I kind of understand why Sarris still couldn't bring himself to let it go in his obituary for Kael.

Agree totally with you about her one-viewing-only credo.

She would have made a helluva literary critic. Her analysis of The Bostonians (which consumes more space than her review of the doomed Merchant Ivory film) is still one of the most cogent on Henry James I've read. Ditto her demurrals on Forster's A Passage to India

As many have pointed out, the irony of "Circles and Squares" is that with a few directors--De Palma and Peckinpah most prominently, but other people like Martin Ritt and Irving Kershner--she came close to being the ultimate auteurist.

uhhh not by the definition of auteurist that she's critiquing in "circles and squares." otherwise she would have thought body double was his best movie.

it's not like she was against discussing a director's career and having favorites

I always forget she's the Tarantino of critics on this board.
Sarris is only good for dotage jokes. 'tis pity.

I was going to add that she did still criticize those guys on occasion, Body Double being a good example. But she loved The Fury to a degree that far exceeds anything else I've ever read on that film, and, skipping forward, there was an interview I read where she praised Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars. Never saw MTM, but I've seen The Fury and Snake Eyes; to me, that's classic auteurist territory.

have you actually read circles and squares? because reading the fact that she liked less popular depalma movies as "classic auteurist territory" suggests you haven't

Are you really asking me that?

(Oops, the ILX stylebook--I need to add an "Um" or an "Uhh" to indicate disbelief.)

Um, are you really asking me that?

fyi sarris' three premises of "auteur theory"

1. that the technical competence of the director is a criterion of value
2. that the distinguishable personality of the director is a criterion
3. the "ultimate glory of cinema" is the "interior meaning" you get from the "tension between a director's personality and his material.

that kael liked movies you haven't seen anyone else like doesn't make the fact that she found the last two pretty absurd ironic at all.

Wow, thanks!

no doubt having a difficult time finding decent rolls.

Picture Lauren Bacall regarding the selection at her local bakery with disgust.