Pauline Kael

Kael is good...fun to read...but she misses the point a lot. Style is repetitive, even more so than that of most writers. Her main contributions: prescient review of "Bonnie and Clyde"; review of "Nashville" before it was offically released. Liked Altman when it was cool to dismiss him (post-M*A*S*H). Also, in her piece on "Long Goodbye" (Altman's take on Raymond Chandler) she really demolishes Chandler as the high-class hack he really was...so all to the good...

Touchy, eh?

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/09/06/viewing_the_parcels_of_pauline/?page=full

Weekend
"Only the title of this extraordinary poetic satire is casual and innocent. The writer-director Jean-Luc Godard has a gift for making the contemporary satiric and fantastic. He begins with just a slight stylization of civilized living now—the people are more adulterous, more nakedly mercenary, touchier. They have weapons, and use them at the slightest provocation, and it seems perfectly logical that they should get into their cars and bang into one another and start piling up on the roads. The traffic jam is a prelude to highways littered with burning cars and corpses. As long as Godard stays with cars as the symbol of bourgeois materialism, the barbarity of these bourgeois—their greed and the self-love they project onto their possessions—is exact and funny. The picture goes much further—sometimes majestically, sometimes with surreal details that suggest an affinity between Godard and Buñuel, sometimes with methods and ideas that miss, badly. There are extraordinary passages, such as a bourgeois wife's erotic confession and a long virtuoso sequence of tracking shots of cars stalled on the highway, with the motorists pressing down with all their might on their car horns, which sound triumphant, like trumpets in Purcell. Though deeply flawed, this film has more depth than any of Godard's earlier work. It's his vision of Hell and it ranks with the greatest. As a mystical movie WEEKEND is comparable to Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL and SHAME and Ichikawa's FIRES ON THE PLAIN and passages of Kurosawa, yet we're hardly aware of the magnitude of the writer-director's conception until after we are caught up in the comedy of horror, which keeps going further and further and becoming more nearly inescapable, like Journey to the End of the Night."

Exorcist II: The Heretic
"Directed by John Boorman, this picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang's loony METROPOLIS). Some of its telepathic sequences are golden-toned and lyrical, and the film has a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic quality; it might have been a horror classic if it had had a simpler, less ritzy script. But, along with flying demons and theology inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, the movie has Richard Burton, with his precise diction, helplessly and inevitably turning his lines into camp, just as the cultivated, stage-trained actors in early-30s horror films did. Like them, Burton has no conviction in what he's doing, so he can't get beyond staginess and artificial phrasing. The film is too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (and when it opened, there were accounts of people in theatres who threw things at the screen). But it's winged camp—a horror fairy tale gone wild, another in the long history of moviemakers' king-size follies. There's enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what it lacks is judgment—the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession. With Linda Blair, four year older than in the first film and going into therapy because of her nightmares, Louise Fletcher as the therapist, and Max von Sydow, Kitty Winn, Ned Beatty, Paul Henreid, and James Earl Jones as Pazuzu."

The Fury
"Brian De Palma's visionary, science-fiction thriller is the reverse side of the coin of Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. With Spielberg, what happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to laugh; with De Palma, it's so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh. The script (John Farris's adaptation of his novel) is cheap gothic espionage occultism involving two superior beings—spiritual twins (Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving) who have met only telepathically. But the film is so visually compelling that a viewer seems to have entered a mythic night world; no Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many "classic" sequences."

A Clockwork Orange
"This Stanley Kubrick film might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy. The movie is adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, which is set in a vaguely socialist future of the late 70s or early 80s—a dreary, routinized England that roving gangs of teenage thugs terrorize at night. In this dehumanizing society, there seems to be no way for the boys to release their energies except in vandalism and crime. The protagonist, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), is the leader of one of these gangs; he's a conscienceless schoolboy sadist who enjoys stealing, stomping, raping, and destroying, until he kills a woman and is sent to prison. There he is conditioned into a moral robot who becomes nauseated by thoughts of sex and violence. Burgess wrote an ironic fable about a future in which men lose their capacity for moral choice. Kubrick, however, gives us an Alex who is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with power and slyness. So at the end, when Alex's bold, aggressive, punk's nature is restored to him, it seems not a joke on all of us (as it does in the book) but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. Along the way, Alex has been set apart as the hero by making his victims less human than he; the picture plays with violence in an intellectually seductive way—Alex's victims are twisted and incapable of suffering. Kubrick carefully estranges us from these victims so that we can enjoy the rapes and beatings. Alex alone suffers. And how he suffers! He's a male Little Nell—screaming in a strait jacket during the brainwashing; sweet and helpless when rejected by his parents; alone, weeping, on a bridge; beaten, bleeding, lost in a rainstorm; pounding his head on a floor and crying for death. Kubrick pours on the hearts and flowers; what is done to Alex is far worse than what Alex has done, so society itself can be felt to justify Alex's hoodlumism."

Charly
"Sometimes mawkish pictures (like DAVID AND LISA and TO SIR WITH LOVE & 1967 and this one) catch on with the public and are taken seriously; characteristically naïve, "sincere," and pitifully clumsy in execution, they are usually based on material that experienced directors are too knowing to attempt. CHARLY, which had already been a heavily anthologized short story ("Flowers for Algernon," by Daniel Keyes), a TV play, and a novel, has the kind of terrible idea that makes what is often called "a classic"—really a stunted perennial. In the movie, directed by Ralph Nelson and adapted by Stirling Silliphant, Charly (Cliff Robertson), the mentally retarded adult whose teacher (Claire Bloom) helps him get brain surgery, tries to rape her as soon as he gets some book learning. Rejected, he becomes a hippie and a Hell's Angel, but he soon goes back to his books and becomes a fantastic, computer-sharp supergenius, and he and the teacher have an affair. The scheming scientists didn't tell him, though: his genius is only temporary—he must go back to being a dummy. This cheap fantasy with its built-in sobs also takes the booby prize for the worst use (yet) of the split screen; it's a slovenly piece of moviemaking and it's full of howlers. CHARLY may represent the unity of schlock form and schlock content—true schlock art."

The Sound of Music
"Set in Austria in 1938, this is a tribute to freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre. Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands—millions—of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer—he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether."

West Side Story
"The film begins with a blast of stereophonic music, and everything about it is supposed to stun you with its newness, its size. The impressive, widely admired opening shots of New York from the air overload the story with values and importance—technological and sociological. And the dance movements are so sudden and huge, so portentously "alive" they're always near the explosion point. Consider the feat: first you take Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and remove all that cumbersome poetry; then you make the Montagues and Capulets modern by turning them into rival street gangs of native-born and Puerto Ricans. (You get rid of the parents, of course; America is a young country—and who wants to be bothered by the squabbles of older people?) There is the choreographer Jerome Robbins (who conceived the stage musical) to convert the street rumbles into modern ballet—though he turns out to be too painstaking for high-powered moviemaking and the co-director Robert Wise takes over. The writers include Ernest Lehman, who did the script, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the Broadway show, and, for the lyrics, Stephen Sondheim. The music is by Leonard Bernstein. The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert. There's even a heavenly choir. When Romeo-Tony meets his Juliet-Maria, everything becomes gauzy and dreamy and he murmurs, "Have we met before?" When Tony, floating on the clouds of romance, is asked, "What have you been taking tonight?" he answers, "A trip to the moon." Match that for lyric eloquence! (You'd have to go back to Odets.)"

tthere's a new URL for that dead Geocities page of 2800+ Kael reviews; I saw it this week but didn't save the addy. Anyone?

that's an invaluable resource. I was very sad when it went down.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20091026174320/http://geocities.com/paulinekaelreviews/

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

cant find it, but i turned this up

http://thisrecording.com/film/2008/8/18/in-which-wes-anderson-tries-to-game-pauline-kael.html

my reaction to rushmore was similar to hers when i first saw it

It was included as the intro to the published Rushmore script eight or nine years ago.

Yeah, but Edelstein mentions that she was mortified when it appeared in the New York Times too.

OOH. I didn't know about this squabble.

I'm sure I've made it more than clear how much I love Kael, but I think she was completely wrong about Rushmore (to the extent that I can piece together her reaction from interviews, which seemed to be one of puzzlement). Just in general, I found I agreed with her less and less often towards the end. The quality of her writing was still great, but I found in terms of what she liked, she veered way in the direction of junk; it was almost like she discounted films that had any pretense towards seriousness. Her critics would probably say that that was always a problem with her, but at her best during the '70s, I think gave everything a fair look. I didn't feel that was true her last couple of years and in the interviews she gave after retiring. Obviously, there are exceptions--just a general observation.

I disagree. While it's true she reviewed more junk, the eighties and early nineties also produced more and more of it. Also, those 1500-word essays on forgotten junk like Club Paradise and About Last Night feature some of her best writing ever; it's as if she accepted the terms of the debate and relaxed.

'70s >>> '80 for movies, but State of the Art and Hooked are my favorites of her collections.

A bunch of junk from the '80s has aged a little bit better than many of the serious movies from the same decade.

Fat keeps.

I dont think you can say someone's 'wrong' to be puzzled by a movie - i sure as shit didn't know what to make of it (rushmore) at the time.

wasn't she famously a champion of de sica (as opposed to sariss' "male weepies") and rosellini? i didn't get the impression she eschewed seriousness

She had her blind spots (Bresson, Ozu, Mizoguchi), but so does every critic.

De Sica is sort of trash compared to Rossellini.

Oh wait, she liked Rossellini too? Color me surprised.

i thought i recalled several admiring bresson reviews...l'argent & ... joan of arc maybe?

i love all those guys

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.")

Funny moment at 1:22 where she takes a jab at Insdorf's own work (or the NYT arts and leisure section as a whole): "Very often the writers such as you don't really express your opinion of the work you're writing about."

It's never not been fashionable to take potshots at NYT

Busy week, just started listening to this today. About 40 minutes in...Agree and disagree when it comes to individual films she mentions, but she herself is still an inspiration. Was struck by this, talking about directors she thought were just treading water at the time:

"It's as if certain people were surrounded by such respectability that everything they do is going to get praised, and all it does is take away from the greatness of their great work."

That feels like the rule today, starting with Scorsese. (Which Kael pronounces in what seems like an odd way to me.) No matter what certain directors put out, it will be greeted with praise, praise that's almost as dispiriting as the films themselves. The Andersons, Spielberg, Sofia Coppola. I'd include some relatively newer directors who I think are already there.

was this ever not the case tho? not just in cinema but in all the arts, you reach a certain status and this is how it pans out.

Scorsese the only one from that list that truly applies to tho imo, seen lots of hate for recent Andersons, Coppola, Spielberg.

Yeah. Things haven't changed at all. This scenario applies to musicians too btw.

time to crowdsource a complete list of the paulettes btw (but not poll them bcz polls suck)

If there's a review out there where someone really went off on Asteroid City, or how unbearable in general Wes Anderson's become, please post a link, I'd like to read that. And while I skimmed a couple of mildly negative reviews of Priscilla, a throwaway comment by Greil Marcus--"Having just come from Priscilla feeling as if my IQ dropped 50 points in the course of the movie"--is the only thing I've come across that actually described the film I saw.

(Marcus is not a Paulette, but he is--unreasonably at times, I'd say--fiercely protective when it comes to stuff other people write about her, and he's been writing for 50 years about the profound effect her writing had on him.)

Most of our experiences with art tend to be middling; offenses to the imagination or even to our morals are rare (we live in a B+ world). Ozu and Rohmer went on making similar films; Yo La Tengo and Young Thug do too with albums. Kael herself was guilty of praising middling things, for example writing 1800 words or whatever on Club Paradise -- and some of those reviews of forgotten '80s tripe contain her best writing.

You might disagree, but Spielberg and Scorsese have found new tonalities in their recent work (I can't imagine the Scorsese of a decade ago bringing off Killers). Anderson and Coppola I'll leave to you.

I do see uniformity in the reception to Taylor Swift albums, and, yeah, some of the breathlessness with which may of us on ILM respond in listening threads irritates the hell out of me too; but even those responses have started to crack (i.e. the reception of Midnights).

Ozu and Rohmer went on making similar films; Yo La Tengo and Young Thug do too with albums.

As I've said before, Cannibal Corpse albums sound like Cannibal Corpse; it's called having a style. I make fun of Paul Schrader for making the same movie over and over, but I keep watching. And I want Sofia Coppola to keep making her movie(s), because nobody else is telling those stories — her perspective on femininity (its construction and meaning for those who inhabit it) is basically unique in Hollywood. There are a hundred movies a year that tell us in one way or another what it feels like to be an adolescent boy (of any age), but Coppola is one of the very few people writing and directing from the perspective of a young woman. The only question is whether she's aged out of her chosen subject matter — but I don't think there's any risk of her turning into Larry Clark.

And it's not as if these films earned universal praise. Priscilla strikes me as minor Coppola, but I want her to keep making these films. Fully realized art is more of an accident and less intentional than YouTube documentaries would have the public belief.

If you can't find the mixed-to-negative reviews of Asteroid City, you're not looking that hard

As for Spielberg, may I introduce you to ILX?

Check out the url if you can't open the link: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/06/21/arts/wes-andersons-asteroid-city-is-crashing-bore/

and from Eric H's own Slant: https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/priscilla-review-sofia-coppola-cailee-spaenee-jacob-elordi/

I do grant the basic argument tho, even if I'd pick different directors (*cough* PTA *cough*)

pta was mentioned by clemenza ("the Andersons")

Licoricce Pizza certainly got some dissenting voices but they were tied up into various discourses I don't think we'd want to revisit

I read few hearty embraces of LP.

Finished the full clip, and among the OTM moments is her saying, circa Sophie's Choice, that Streep's gifts in film are far more suited toward comedy. Which is obvious now but I'm sure was anathema back then.

Also, "Scor-seh-seh" fine, but I was completely blindsided when she said "Chris Mahr-CARE" late in the proceedings.

correctly

You don't have to look farther than Kael's old magazine for a Licorice Pizza rave:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/licorice-pizza-reviewed-paul-thomas-andersons-thrilling-coming-of-age-story

(By the way, I exempt Armond White's utterly predictable screeds from the disappearing art of saying No.)

Is "Scor-seh-seh" at all right? I've never heard it pronounced that way ever, until hearing this.

Sure, but you can hardly accuse Brody of jumping on anybody's band wagon; the man's written more than his share of "this film is shit" stuff.

so i was checking if armond is a paulette (ans = some say so yes) and i came across this quote (in new york magazine, unattributed): "“there’s paulettes and there are paulloons”

am i being dim bcz i don't get how “paulloons” works

I think the only pronunciation of Scorsese I've ever heard that didn't end with "-zee" was from Phil Spector, who called him "Skeezy."

Never heard that. Kael was a fan of his early on, yes; I don't really know his writing from then, so I don't know if you can detect her voice there. (Because it's you, mark s., I'm substituting "voice" for the i-word.)

I've heard "Score-sezzy" and "Score-say-zee," and am inclined toward the former in my head.

It sounded to me like Kael was saying "Scor-sezza." The Italian pronunciation is something like "Scor-say-zeh" or "Scor-seh-zeh" depending on how you transcribe the Italian vowels. Kael is schwa-ing down the last vowel but that's not less accurate than saying "zee."

Should be scor-chay-zeh the way everyone insists on spelling it

Frankly I wish the man himself would issue a statement to resolve this once and for all

Pauloon as in Buffoon? Kind word for Armond, considering for instance his moist "review" of a recent Van Morrison album, really mostly a parade of quotes, celebrating the anti-vaxx fount of all wisdom.
Anybody who keeps up with this thread should also check this book---from Publisher's Weekly:

AFTERGLOW: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael
Francis Davis, Pauline Kael, . . Da Capo, $18 (134pp) ISBN 978-0-306-81192-0
This slim but potent volume offers movie lovers an elegant good-bye from the acerbic, wildly opinionated National Book Award– winning film critic who reigned at the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. The New York Times called her "probably the most influential film critic of her time." Kael's enthusiasm for films was contagious, as she praised or damned them with giddy vitality. Longtime friend Davis's three extended conversations find the octogenarian still an avid moviegoer. While this book doesn't offer extended reviews, fans will be delighted to hear Kael weigh in on movies released since she stopped writing a decade ago. She enjoyed the "sweet" Star Trek spoof Galaxy Quest; the first half of Boogie Nights; High Fidelity ("it gets better as it goes along"); and Brian De Palma's Mission to Mars. She was also fond of TV's "terrific" Sex and the City and The Sopranos ("I loved the first season and watched it religiously"). She found Silence of the Lambs "a hideous and obvious piece of moviemaking"; Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut "ludicrous from the word go"; and American Beauty "heavy and turgid." She also blasts later-day Steven Spielberg (Always was "a shameful movie" and the casting was "terribly wrongheaded" in Schindler's List). Besides film quips, Kael defends her critical review of the Holocaust documentary Shoah, regrets being talked out of reviewing Deep Throat and discusses current filmmaking and her 20-year battle with Parkinson's disease. (Sept. 3)

FYI:The book's publication date coincides with the one-year anniversary of Kael's death at age 82.

Wait what’s up with him?

"Scor-seh-see"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbPp13icx1c

Pronouncing it is one thing, spelling it without checking is another.

xxpost He mentions it toward the end of this:
https://artsfuse.org/267051/the-17th-annual-francis-davis-jazz-poll-my-poll-without-me/

Partly my own bias, but felt she was a little nasty about Lauren Bacall--who was almost 60 at that point, only semi-active, and no doubt having a difficult time finding decent rolls.

PauluneKael, catty? I’m shocked. And stunned.

Can’t type either, especially when my keyboard is set to English.

Even when it is in fact set to English;)

yes it's "pauloon"

Every few years I'll go back and listen to the Kael+MacDonald+Simon symposium from 1963-ish, simply because (among other things) it's just a fun sparring match. It's a fascinating contrast to this mid-'80s audio in that Kael back in the earlier instance was more about raising her favorites up. In this newer clip, she's clearly become embittered and — for all she has to say about Ebert & Siskel — seems to think just tossing cherry bombs like "Lauren Bacall was a terrible actress" somehow moves any kind of needle anymore. The more I reflect, the sadder the newer clip feels.

I read Afterglow at the time. She's kind about Carol Reed.

the Kael+MacDonald+Simon symposium from 1963-ish

Do you know if that's available somewhere? I'd love to hear it.

Looks like maybe it is no longer available online. I'll rip and post when I get home later tonight

Wow, thanks!

no doubt having a difficult time finding decent rolls.

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