Pauline Kael

tbh i was asking in case anyone else remembered this same phrase and its location -- or just me (if indeed i do remember and didn't imagine it)

i will carry on searching but am using a hand-wavy workaround in the piece i'm writing

What is now an example of trash?

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS 6, or something?

I thought of Zola.

There's this too, from "Are Movies Going to Pieces?"

People go to the movies for the various ways they express the experiences of our lives, and as a means of avoiding and postponing the pressures we feel. This latter function of art—generally referred to disparagingly as escapism—may also be considered as refreshment, and in terms of modern big city life and small town boredom, it may be a major factor in keeping us sane.

I haven't listened to any yet, but there are a few recordings with her on the Studs Terkel archive site:

https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/pauline-kael-discusses-her-book-kiss-kiss-bang-bang-and-her-career-part-1

Thank you! Turns out I can't get enough of vintage audio clips with her.

i'm looking for where she (maybe) deploys a four-word summary of that 15000-word behemoth

Her 5001 Nights at the Movies bk pares down countless old reviews into a 'guide' format (nb you would be insane to use it as a functional guide a la Maltin). I remember that there was a UK edition at the time of release (1982) and that it got some notice in Time Out etc - so maybe worth looking there, although I imagine it would be quite a task, skimming for a single phrase.

The write-ups in that book are pretty short and to-the-point, there's not a lot of room for her to opine about trash in the abstract; I doubt the quote would be in there.

TIL my Complete New Yorker dvd set no longer works, sorry Mark. Was looking forward to digging.

mine too :(

i vaguely wonder -- as i'm a subscriber -- if i can harass them into supplying some kind of upgrade reader since when i bought it i paid "for all time" (except actually i got it secondhand but they don't know that)

my god she's on fire here -- she talks in sentence after sentence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SUmUnLMWYQ

Hey look, a long interview/discussion from 1984

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGzfX0o5EK4

With Annette Insdorf? Would listen.

Wow! Ripping that audio and podcasting it up

Excellent audio.

Several shots taken at Siskel and Ebert, lol

Only about a half hour in but it’s clear this interview caught her in a moment of severe disenchantment with movies … even the swipes feel a little half hearted

And the laughter nervous

She kind of bet the rent on a certain perhaps ultimately naive view of how the sausage was made and then ultimately got disillusioned…by her buddy Warren Beatty?

Know she would rip me to shreds for the careless double ultimately, that’s for sure.

She gets a little more full-throated when asked to comment on the then-new generation of critics inspired by her (she hated them)

and she admired David Ansen of all people -- he's struck me as vanilla.

She seems to like certain of them but not ones who copy her voice.

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