Pauline Kael

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."

Back to PK: sure her smart American vernacular prose reads easier than the as-if-translated-from-the-French style that some others might have lapsed into but if you give into the easy temptation of just adopting her tastes and prejudices lock, stock and barrel, as somebody more or less said about Nabokov on another thread, you'll end up missing a whole world of fun.

Most people don't though (including the "Paulettes").

Also, the criticism that Kael defended her favorites too strenuously is simply wrong. For every Altman film she loved there was another he panned. She hated every De Palma film after Blow Out. Coppola could not get a break in the eighties. And so on.

I'm not disputing your basic point--she was all over the place with virtually everybody--but don't forget that she loved Casualties of War. And in one of the interview books, she said nice things about Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes.

*there was another SHE panned, I should have written.

I should have attached a footnote re C of W.

Mission of Mars had some good stuff in it. Well at least one good scene of some zero-g choreography.

iirc she actually found the Untouchables to be fun, if slight. certainly didnt hate it

and mostly praised it based on de palma's contributions. and she let him off the hook for bonfire (probably rightfully, considering the level of studio interference)

I'm not sure she lets De Palma off the hook with sentences like:

"The picture grates on your nerves: you sit there listening to Melanie Griffith's metallic whine and you watch Bruce Willis fail at the simple task of playing a comic drunk. These are talented people -- what's happened to them?"

or

"De Palma, who showed a genius for sophomoric comedy in his youth, has already made his Bonfire of the Vanities. It was the daring race-relations jamboree, Hi, Mom!."

still, the damage had been done by then; she made him "imortant." Ye gods.

"important"

(Sunday morning)

James: I watched Mission to Mars with one of my science classes last year. I didn't hate it, but it seemed to be about half pilfered from 2001, half from Close Encounters.

i have to assume kael liked femme fatale. Can't imagine why she wouldn't have.

lol, except i'm an idiot who forgot she died before its release. whoopsie!

for some reason I though she died around 2005 rather than 2001

I just remembered how that Francis Davis book has a list of movies he likes to think she would have dug, with crazy no-way shit like Death To Smoochy on it.

By the way, da croupier, I noticed that Frank Rich said virtually the same thing in his column that you took me to task for a few months ago:

A fierce skeptic of all dogmas (including religion, feminism and liberalism) who made her name in part by knocking Sarris for promoting the auteur theory, Kael didn’t recognize that she had morphed into a dogmatic auteurist in her own right — lauding her pet directors no matter what.

I think he overstates the case, but you questioned at the time whether I had even read "Circles and Squares." Do you suppose Rich has read it?

He's misread it, at least. And as we've said, "lauding her pet directors no matter what" is straight up bullshit, so why should I be shocked he's wrong about the other half of the sentence?

half of the sentence fragment, I meant.

Good, I've made progress--you're ready to concede that I've misread "Circles and Squares."

That's some Maureen Dowd level "narrative"-humping Rich's pulling there.

Just curious: do you have any criticisms of Kael?

Forgot about that Francis Davis book. Also forgot about her only watching movies once thing which still seems crazy, but perhaps it is a mark of a vastly superior intelligence, like the one discovered by Don Cheadle on his Mission to Mars.

way too much second person. occasionally her euphoria for a film is a bit much, though that's usually just like a few paragraphs of an otherwise dense, worthwhile read. tastewise she's a little too in love with gunga din-ery.

xpost

curious how many of you have read any Molly Haskell.

I've noticed in this cycle of reevaluation that a couple of writers have taken her to task for having such ambivalence about mass taste, which is absurd: not only was she aware of it (and the ambivalence made her a better critic), but there's no way anyone as alert as Kael could NOT be ambivalent about mass taste.