Pauline Kael

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

I may see this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=341&v=zyn23q7g5ok

That's been up for a while--maybe somebody already posted it on one of the other Kael threads. Tarantino looks like he'll be unbearable.

This is a better link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyn23q7g5ok

Out soon, presumably.

http://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/what-she-said-the-art-of-pauline-kael-review-1203133864/

Sounds like our kind of Won't You Be My Neighbor.

RIP

pauline would've been the worst kids' show host ever

good sketch potential

still like to see Streep play her in Feud

She'd send kids home crying.

Whether the documentary is good, bad, or mediocre, there'll be a bunch of people who knew her ripping it to shreds within a day. (Unless, I suppose, they were interviewed for it.)

episode one: a kid says his favorite drink is apple juice, pauline responds "oh, try it again. you won't like it."

"There's no ambiguity in apple juice."

pauline's personal hell would be having to watch the same episode of Mr. Rogers or Barney over and over again

I guess "What She Said" is the filmmakers attempt at a "I Lost It At The Movies" Kaelian double entendre?

thought this was a v charming story about meeting pauline back in the 90s:

http://sessumsmagazine.com/2019/02/02/pauline-at-the-buggy-whip-factory-our-day-with-pauline-kael/

That was an entertaining read.

The "disappointment" question Bram raises at the end reminds me of Woody Allen in a '77 interview with Dick Cavett, where they both talked about getting to know elderly Groucho Marx, and Woody says he "just seemed like a funny Jewish uncle."

I thought the funniest line in there was her reaction to the Pee-Wee Herman scandal: “He was visiting his family. Oh fuck. Who hasn’t done something stupid when they were visiting their family?”

i don't think i've ever seen the words "charming" and "pauline kael" in the same sentence before