Pauline Kael

Think I'm more interested in reading the Wolcott book than the Kael biography, tbh.

there's a bit of "inside baseball" but that comes w/the kaelian territory

uh yeah the contempt seems personal enough that I can't really take his dismissal of her Debra Winger and DePalma fanship seriously.

man kael really got some guys nuts in a twist, didn't she

i mean nothing will top sarris' eulogy but i'm amazed how desperate a lot of male critics are to send her ghost a condescending pat on the head

she was better. must hurt their ego. nobody ever ran home to read an owen gleiberman review.

nobody ANTICIPATED one of his reviews. or any of those other guys reviews.

Came away from Carson's piece realizing more than ever that cutting DePalma off at the knees is merely the simplest means for (I guess) rejected Paulettes to scrape what's left of themselves off of the bug zapper.

And that it's no doubt a lot easier to appreciate the material that pre-dates their own interactions with Kael.

(Still a good read otherwise.)

i read sarris for years in the voice when i was a kid and very little of it stuck with me. which is fine if you are just looking for a good movie to see on friday night.

Love it how SSS spells it out: "In between she pursued an ill-judged taste for relationships with gay men, and had a daughter, Gina, whose father refused involvement in her upbringing."

The mix of condescension and reign-resentment...it's like she was a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Stalin to these people.

xpost also, LOL at David E. in the comments: "Triumph of the Will & Grace marriage"

okay, i like that siren thing too. that siren person says everything i was thinking much better than i could. kudos to the siren. i never knew about the siren. now i know.

jesus, i mean we live in a world where david denby still writes film reviews. its just not fair...

For the most part, I stayed home in the apartment that I loved. And instead of going out, I entered in that summer of 1999 a dark and empty tunnel, an enclosure illuminated along the walls by a flash of naked men and women. I had discovered porn on the Internet. In the solitude of night, and in my little study at home, where mighty volumes of Plato, St. Augustine, Hegel, Montaigne, Nietzsche hardly my regular reading but a recent obsession loomed over the desk, the kneeling young women awkwardly turned their eyes to the camera. They often had long and beautiful hair that they must have laboriously cared for; they looked for approval not from their partners but from the camera, which I thought was the true object of their desire. They wanted to be seen. And the men, ugly and strong, sullen, tattooed some of them, thick-membered, concentrating on their erection and their orgasm, lest they lose either they were amateurs, not models, exercising the democratic art form of exhibitionism, with me as their willing audience. They all wanted to be seen, but I didn t want to be seen.

that should be his obituary.

i hope the times has that on file.

For a sec, I was sure that was David E.

Not as lengthy as everything linked to thus far, but a friend of mine posted something on the biography yesterday:

http://begonias.typepad.com/srubio/2011/10/pauline-kael-a-life-in-the-dark.html

It's not such a big deal that she demonstrated what Fassbindder meant to her by ignoring him altogether; it's more important that she defended Joseph Ruben thrillers.

*Fassbinder

And there was also a homophobic strain to a lot of her writing on films with gay characters and themes, which was by no means unique but certainly contrasts poorly with her very advanced, matter-of-fact writing about films with black and Hispanic characters.

I wish this fucking "meme" will die.

like a lot of us, she recoiled from special pleading on behalf of a besieged minority.

Except when it came to James Toback.

haha. She was right about The Pickup Artist though; and I wish she was still writing when Two Girls and a Guy came out.

I want to the same of Tyson--which I thought was excellent--but I don't know. Thinking about how much she disliked Raging Bull, she may have recoiled from Tyson for some of the same reasons.

"want to say the same"

i always thought the paulette/acolytes thing was creepy tbh

I really wish guys like him could appreciate her just as a writer. Who cares whether they share tastes?

But her defenses of her taste were often imperious or just didn't make sense.

My fave quote of hers is still "If I had only known trash would become the only culture..." Which suggests to me that if she had written for another ten years, you guys would call her "morbsian."

also, Andrew Sarris was not a "consumer guide for your Friday night movie" critic, that kind of shit is insulting.

AND he didn't pretend world cinema didn't exist in the '80s.

lol

you flatter yrself, herr doktor

Sarris on Old Hollywood is invaluable.

you guys would call her "morbsian."

I would call you "presumptuous."

yeah. i'd trust Kael to actually see the movies she trashes.

i realize she would deservedly be insulted!

(if she lurked)

throw that meme in the garbage can, Guk

i'd loooove to read her pan of inglobius nasturds

deservedly feel insulted, i meant

That’s great! You tell me I’m wrong while denying you’re doing so, a very Kaelian tactic!

i'd loooove to read her pan of inglobius nasturds

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius)

http://www.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs1/1884896_o.gif

lol, nasturds

omar otm

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/pauline_kael_hero_or_hack/singleton/

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Saturday, October 29, 2011 10:41 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

outlaw vern shoutout in there! vern is the man

kael's never been just about the writing for me, though she was a great writer obv, but i think her insights were often really top notch and the reason i read her was because she saw angles i didnt

lol @ omar busting out that gif

Seitz is otm about the level of insight in this Kael paragraph:

“If having ‘the right stuff’ is set up as the society’s highest standard, and if a person proves that he has it by his eagerness to be locked in a can and shot into space, the only thing that distinguishes human heroes from chimps is that the heroes volunteer for the job. And if they volunteer, as they do in this film, out of personal ambition and for profit, are they different from the chimp who might jump into the can eagerly, too, if he saw a really big banana there?”

So back to the new bio, who's actually read it? Is it worth picking up?

re James Wolcott, I knew him first as the TV critic for the Voice in the early '80s, where he properly enthused about The Uncle Floyd Show.

the kael para alfred quotes above abt the right stuff - which i loved as both movie and book - makes me want to read much more of her work, even if i disagree with it

Talked to Uncle Floyd's younger brother Jerry a few years ago at the 55 Bar, right before he and the other brother were going with Conan to LA to do the Tonight Show and he told me Floyd had some radio show out of Connecticut maybe playing old-time ethnic Italian music. Always amazed me that he was related to those two other guys.

Sorry, New Rochelle.

From his Wikipedia page:

David Bowie, a big fan of the show, recorded the song "Slip Away" on his 2002 album, Heathen, as a tribute. The lyrics mention Uncle Floyd and his puppets "Oogie" and "Bones Boy". When asked how Bowie learned of The Uncle Floyd Show he replied, "John Lennon told me about it."