Pauline Kael

xxp

Yeah, I'd forgotten about her Redford thing; just meant that in general she seemed to have an aversion to "whiny white guy" movies (which may have been a more accurate way to put it).

she also recoiled from genre films that aspired to art

ie Goodfellas

but yet loved Mean Streets

Hill shows such a limited perspective that the film is comic-book cops-and-robbers existentialism.

this is what he was after, PK

she pulled the same "Where is Cagney?" thing with Goodfellas.

She's not wrong for disliking Goodfellas but ...

she pulled the same "Where is Cagney?" thing with Goodfellas.

The movie had Joe Pesci.

she loved The Grifters, disliked The Silence of the Lambs.

That Geocities archive is such a nice relic from the old internet.

except i have freq gotten virus warnings from it.

I read and probably linked to this piece at the time (republished yesterday). I think it's excellent--although I continue to be perplexed by the idea that the Brian Kellow book was unsympathetic (and anyway, it's a biography--is it supposed to be sympathetic?).

http://www.vulture.com/2019/06/remembering-pauline-kael-film-critic.html

there's a nice appreciation of Kael by Farran Smith Nehme in the current Sight and Sound followed by an edited Q&A she gave at the NFT in London in 82. If anyone is very keen I do have a pdf of it I could share.

she says this about Lynch:

Eraserhead [1977] has been one of the
most extraordinary films of the last few
years. Can you say something about
American avant-garde film and is it
coming into the major studios?
Eraserhead is an amazing film, because as clearly as you can figure at what you’re seeing – even though the pacing is monstrous and it takes too long – it has a quality I don’t think I’ve ever seen in another film, which was about men’s anxiety states on dating,
and their terrors of their wives, and their children and parents-in-law. I mean, that man is every adolescent boy’s image of himself
on a date. It is a really hair-raisingly scary movie. I quite love it, and I do think David Lynch is a remarkable talent as he showed again with The Elephant Man [1980], because that script was absolutely zilch, and he turned it into something quite marvellous.
There are images in Eraserhead that stay with you the way images from The Blood of the Poet [1932] or Un chien andalou [1929] do. The image of that man and the hooker from across the hall; when they’re on the bed making love, and they deliquesce into the bed itself, and finally you see they disappear except for the woman’s long hair floating on the bed. That is a pretty scary, powerful erotic image. The whole film has a strange erotic feeling to it; you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going on at any given moment that’s holding you there, but you’re being held. Considering that he’s using pasteboard sets, it’s a wonderful piece of work. He’s
a phenomenally gifted filmmaker.

I couldn't be bothered fixing the formatting, sorry.

someone posted her entire pan of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet here

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/romeo-and-juliet-1968/1/

100 today. Wherever she is, complaining about the state of movies.

Sight & Sound centerpiece: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/pleaures-pauline-kael-film-critic-legacy

happy 100th pauline! even though i'm not sure i'd want to read your pan of a hard day's night.

here's charles taylor's tribute:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/happy-birthday-pauline

Don't think I ever knew that about A Hard Day's Night--where was that published, J.D.?

She didn't like Head either...

uh

nice

it's mentioned in the sight and sound article as one of the reviews she did for mccall's, and i've seen it referenced a few other places. i always had the sense that a lot of her early work was never reprinted -- i don't think i ever saw her pan of lawrence of arabia either. but i'm sure i would've remembered reading a pan of AHDN.

XP Knew that would happen...get yr mind outta the gutter Soto

she folded remarks about those films into others. I've read her assessments of what O'Toole accomplished and got a sense that she both jeered at and was relieved by Omar Sharif.

From Taylor's piece:

I remain convinced that the reason for this view of Pauline is misogyny. There’s never a problem when a group of men share a sensibility, no automatic assumption that they speak with one voice.

Thankfully, I think we're finally reaching the point where the second sentence here is actually not true, and it's a very good thing.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang contains only a passing reference to A Hard Day's Night which reads as somewhat favorable. She did not like Help!, which she compared to TV commercials. It seems as if she preferred the Dave Clark Five film Having a Wild Weekend aka Catch Us If You Can to both.

The only bit of the Taylor piece that lost me was the feminism paragraph.

Sorry to mention this on her centennial, but I just happened to be reading the 2nd edition (2016) of Movie Journal: the Rise of the New American Cinema 1959-1971, which is a collection of Jonas Mekas's film columns for the Village Voice, and it contains an unusually harsh takedown of Kael that goes on for several pages in the introduction, written by the book's editor, Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker. Sample:

Kael was no cultural conservative, but her criticism lacked substance. She dismissed the debate over culture under the guise of irreverence and wit. Kael mocked the kinds of concerns that could unite two so different critics as Mekas and Dwight MacDonald about the enrichment of culture. Film was purely about entertainment. By embracing this position, Kael could dismiss the entire discussion about the relation between film and culture as elitist.

There's much more like that.

Film was purely about entertainment.

She never avowed anything like this. It's not just a lie, it's an insult to liars.

I thought the Adler critique quoted in the S&S piece was also kind of hilariously reductive: “She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections – and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one – they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion.”

You can level the charge of "criticism lacking substance" just as much at Mekas, whose responses to films were among the most completely subjective that I can think of, and that's often what I loved about his writing ("a syllogism: Barbara Rubin has no shame. Angels have no shame. Therefore Barbara Rubin is an angel.").

As for Adler, puh-leeze. Probably one of the worst critics to ever write for a major outlet. My favorite is when her review of some B-movie just consisted of a couple of lines of kvetching about having to review such trash a few days after the RFK assassination. Greil Marcus takedown of her is priceless: "Throughout, [Adler's book] Pitch Dark made me think of a useful cultural test: upon acquaintance, how long can one who has gone to Harvard or Radcliffe refrain from mentioning the fact. I have met people who have lasted several years, though several hours is generally considered laudatory. Adler (Harvard, MA, 1960) does not make it past her third page."

I actually like many of Adler's political journalism, including essays on William and Rehnquist and Robert Bork that represent two of the best dissections of loathsome careers I've read, but she was NOT a film critic.

*William

yeah, Kael liked Bresson and Shoeshine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=fpV_bkcdNqk

A propos of nothing, that documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2018), which has been kicking around FOREVER, is a pile of shit, full of talking heads mouthing flagrant untruths, all offering shockingly little insight as to what defined Pauline Kael as a writer.

— 𝕮𝖔𝖒𝖊 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝕲𝖊𝖙 𝕸𝖊, 𝕮𝖔𝖕𝖕𝖊𝖗𝖘 (@NickPinkerton) January 21, 2020

No, it's not great.

I've stopped looking at Toronto film listings, so I missed three screenings of the documentary in January. Got another chance tonight--the last for a while I figured--so I made the four-hour return trip into the city to see it.

Thought it was just fine. There was enough autobiography, it touched on all the big controversies, you heard Kael's voice a lot, and it wasn't out-and-out hagiography--you did hear from Adler and George Roy Hill and Molly Haskell, among others. (Of course it was mostly laudatory--what else would you expect?) I'm not sure what the flagrant untruths referred to above were.

Some of the clips were misplaced, suggesting she liked films she didn't, and I'm not sure why they used The Exorcist to frame talk of her house in Massachusetts. The quotes from negative reviews didn't hold up that well out of context--especially with The Sound of Music, which in 2020 feels like fish in barrel. Could have done without Tarantino. But I really liked Edelstein and Marcus, and--having literally just read Allen Barra's piece in Talking About Pauline Kael--I found the audio from her last interview, with Barra's 10-year-old daughter, quite moving. In the same book, which I'm only about 50 pages into, I loved Ray Sawhill's piece, so I wish he'd been in the documentary somewhere.

I still believe--maybe even more so than when I suggested it somewhere in one of the Kael threads--that there's a great narrative film to be made with Meryl Streep as Kael. Just a series of key moments from her life--"Circles and Squares," Bonnie and Clyde, Paramount, Shoah, etc.--with some kind of linking frame maybe. Can You Ever Forgive Me? from a couple of years ago was pretty good, and Kael's story is surely a better one that what that film started with. Enough time has passed that there's a generation (or two) that doesn't know her, and Streep's involvement would guarantee it'd be seen. Whether she'd ever do it, who knows--she could have a field day, though.

Finally got around to seeing Shoah, which I found amazing. Then went back to read Kael's review and oh boy, that seems genuinely unhinged.

William Shawn didn't want to publish it--I don't know if she had to rewrite a lot, or just lobby hard. But I give her credit for going forward. I assume she didn't choose a holocaust film as a platform to just push other people's buttons; she reacted, and she put it out there.

An interview from 2000 has appeared on Youtube. I haven't heard this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLKl4_gSpuk

Two friends and I have been doing some year-end Zoomcasts on films and TV shows we saw last year--there's about 12 minutes here on the Kael documentary (segueing into Mank) starting around 6:30.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AIV2yp3cdk

Surprised no one revived this thread in conjunction with I'm Thinking of Ending Things. What would Kael have thought about it, or about being quoted? Seems like something she'd tear apart, but I don't know. She did like Lynch a lot.

kaelheads!! i am trying to locate (and indeed confirm the existence of) the pithy phrase "trash keeps us sane": did pauline write this in so many words* and if she did, where exactly? (google is not helping and the kael-era new yorker is not so fully digitised that i could track it down internally) (if it was even in the new yorker)

*(yes she several times wrote it in more words and other ways)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9d5csMFAfE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZr5HpNm2TU

lol remembering tony parsons back when he was good (he was never good) pointing out the very evident sense of flopsweat-turned-relief when bry catches that tossed mic

ANYWAY back to my pauline k request

(and apologetic headbob to morbz's irritable shade for briefly going along with the threadjack)

I think what she said, not in so many words, was that "trash gives us an appetite for art." I think it was the last line in "Trash, Art and the Movies."

That's the closest ID I can make too. She may have made passing remarks dissing Stanley Kramer or something.

insofar as it's stuck in my memory at all (lol poorly) it's not from one of the big essays (which i already checked) but very much in passing in a subsequent review (late 70s? early 80s?) -- i've done a highspeed pass thru the books (in case a film title provides the synaptic linkage) but not yet located it

on one hand my memory may very well be inexact! but on the other my brain did glom onto this snappy version as a funny thing to say and i semi-trust it desite everything

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/pauline-kael-trash-art-movies/