Pauline Kael

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.

Vincent Canby with more vinegar?

xpost

(xxxpost) Fair enough. In some of your posts above, you seem to strike out aggressively at anyone who criticizes her for anything. She's one of two writers (the other Bill James) who's influenced me more than any other, yet there are a number of things about her writing (especially during her last few years, which is admittedly a little unfair) that bother me.

i strike out aggressively, because I feel most critiques are pat, small-minded or misguided, and I usually say why.

def not denying i'm a huuuuuge kael stan

Even if you disagree with some of his points along the way, I think the Rich piece is fair, and anything but small-minded. And it leads to a final sentence that I think does justice to her: "If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished age of movies, you must begin with Kael."

Was just thinking about MH right before you posted, Morbius. I've only got the two books, would read more if I could.

phil, you should recall that d.c. is a rabid anti-auteurist and that on any film thread he likes to play Tom Wolfe to everyone else's radical chic.

look at that! Narrative writing going on in this thread!

"If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished age of movies, you must begin with Kael."

well, but this is boilerplate. It's as if I wrote, "If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished Camelot, you mus begin with Kennedy."

Also: like how Rich (inadvertently) appropriates Kael's "you."

I guess MH also wrote the memoir about when Andy S was sick and the Gone with the Wind book.

i grazed through the rich piece after reading your quote, clemenza. still pretty boilerplate (as al put it), but only that bit you quoted re: auteurism struck me as truly false and toxic. Will admit I'm wary to read the bio just because I don't know if I want to sweat her being an unpleasant person. Her "ethical lapses" tend to be overplayed by jealous types, I think. Though this Raising Kane stuff was news to me and, if true, genuinely unethical. I don't give a shit if she actually dared to hang out with these people rather than just kiss ass on press junkets, though.

Rich slipping into second-person (inadvertently or as a little joke, I don't know) is funny, yes. But some cliches are cliches because they're true (to use a cliche). If you wanted to get a sense of American film during the '70s, I don't think you'd read Sarris.

Picking on her for hanging out with directors -- a criticism hurled against her even in the early nineties when I discovered her -- always struck me as willful ignorance. Not even a writer with half of Kael's finesse could avoid turning out hackish prose for the sake of praising one of her drinking buddies.

I remember reading a review of For Keeps in The Atlantic which mentioned her falling out with Woody Allen after she flushed Stardust Memories down a commode, despite her love for things like The Purple Rose of Cairo, Judy Davis in H&W (this performance is pure Kael bait), and the romcom half of Manhattan Murder Mystery.

yeah i dunno if its blind rage over her dissing raging bull or incredulous to her loving...(actually, what movie is it shocking she dared to promote?) that makes people pretend she was just a groupie

I mean Blow Out is on Criterion, Nashville and Last Tango are pretty canonized, so what's the big "you're on your own, Pauline!" movie (can't be Casualties, that's way too late in her career)? I can't get behind her Temple Of Doom love but I wouldn't say she's a Spielberg worshipper, she just wishes he'd stick to offensive slapstick.

As a sign of how deeply they misunderstand women or simply don't give a damn about them, Biskind actually suggests in his Beatty biography that Kael's misadventure (at Beatty's behest) as a Hollywood adviser inspired her dismissal of Reds. I couldn't believe I read something so petty and misogynist in the 21st century.

o what's the big "you're on your own, Pauline!" movie (can't be Casualties, that's way too late in her career)?

Only small things like Mike's Murder (and I share her affection for Debra Winger), Music Box, and anything by the Taviani brothers.

Is Shoot The Moon any good? Her review of that is pretty over the top.

totally googling "tom wolfe radical chic", fyi

Thinking about the ebb and flow of her evaluations of Allen and Altman, she obviously didn't give any either of them a free pass. But I would still rather a critic not befriend people she write about. Maybe it sometimes caused her to overcompensate in the other direction--slam a film more harshly than she otherwise would have, as a way to check herself. I have no idea, but I have to believe it complicates any evaluation. (A rock-critic example: Marcus and Elvis Costello.)

It is actually, once you get past the incongruity of Diane Keaton and Albert Finney as man and wife.

It does happen, but she didn't oscillate wildly between poles either. She gave Zelig, Hannah and Radio Days grudging thumbs up, and thought Come Back to the Five and Dime (I haven't seen it) an awful play.

I don't think you have to get drinks with an artist to play the "I overrated your last thing so I'm gonna slam the next one" bit. It's pretty familiar in any critic who became a fan.