Pauline Kael

never got the feeling she thought Streep lacked talent, but that those films were constructed as deadly Great Acting Vehicles for her. And she was right about A Cry in the Dark.

She left the scenery chewing to the sister of PK's onetime best friend.

no doubt Streep loved reading how her weaknesses were precisely what made her A Cry in the Dark so effective.

i have more time for 80s streep than soto and kael but postcards from the edge and esp defending yr life represent a turn for her toward her much better work in adaptation, devil wears prada, etc

this is my fav Twilight Zone performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY2OE6vBxQM

lol is that what prompted this

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

HUGE sneakers fan but man talk about more talented, fun costars.

Totally. One of the few movies I ever saw twice in the theaters, but the thing I remember most about him is how wooden his reading of "you're the one who's going to have to pull the trigger" was at the end.

hell I loved Streep playing lovelorn pastafazoola The Bridges of Madison County.

the success of Sneakers coincided with the period in pop music when old people (i.e. fortysomethings) scored top five hits.

haha im p sure it is balls

(just as it crested too)

I think Redford suffered from his post 70s work being a lot less interesting than his contemps, like Nicholson, deniro, pacino. Maybe even Hoffman. He's not a dude who has a lot of onscreen fire, pretty slow burn kinda guy.

I forgot about Spy Games! He wasn't at all bad in that one.

man, my mom LOVED the electric horseman

and basically anything with robert redford in it

Postcards from the Edge is kinda fun, but has any movie about addiction ever made addiction look LESS horrifying?

Spy game! I've heard that's kind of awesome.

well yeah she fucks Dennis Quaid.

xpost

He's not a dude who has a lot of onscreen fire, pretty slow burn kinda guy.

like Alain Delon? who gets credit for being French and nonblond.

Delon is better at though. Although yeah he is both of those things

OMG is that John Williams as Shakespeare in that Burt Reynolds Twilight Zone?

redford's pretty great in a lot of movies though don't get me wrong.

In retrospect are all those Meryl Streep perhaps really so bad. I mean they are a little more theatrical than one normally expects from screen acting but they are still affecting. You might as well accuse Sir Larry of the same thing.

they're stiff as hell and constricted by notions of what Good Acting looks like. On the other hand, what else was a young actress like Streep to do? These parts are what young actresses auditioned for. I'm sure she bumped into Jessica Lange, Sissy Spacek, and Debra Winger at a lot of auditions, although those three plus Diane Keaton gave more performances during the period that have held up better and I'd watch twice.

Perhaps I should watch a few to confirm my speculation but on second thought maybe not. You've called my bluff.

There was so much hushed 'buzz' about Streep just after her supporting trifecta of Deer Hunter-Manhattan-Seduction of Joe Tynan(!) that I suspect she was first choice for everything she made for the next 5-6 years.

A.O. Scott's article, cited here often, on Streep and the peculiar somnolence of eighties films.

I think the only one of her Great Actress films I saw was Out of Africa, from which I remember absolutely nothing. She's excellent in The Deer Hunter.

and sexy!

"'80s films" used there as a lazy cliche like "'80s music." I'll take Housekeeping, Cutter's Way and The Replacements over Out of Africa and A Flock of Seagulls, Alex.

She's got some funny small-talk that's always trailing off into nothing, and an excellent crying scene as she prices stuff in the supermarket. (xpost)

Just realized I wasn't counting Kramer as a Great Actress film. She's still in a supporting role there. I think she's quite good in Kramer.

when IS Housekeeping getting a DVD release?

I can understand why critics nestled onto Aldomovar's lap when the Ameri-indie alternative resembled lo-fi respect-o-cinema.

Vastly prefer Housekeeping the film to the book it is based on but think I'm in the minority.

I do too. Gilead is a better novel.

Nowadays “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “A Cry in the Dark” would be scruffy little Sundance movies. “Out of Africa” would be in French. “Silkwood” would be “The Blind Side.”

yup.

when IS Housekeeping getting a DVD release?

I just pulled this thread up a little while ago for an unrelated reason, and hey: The films of Bill Forsyth - C or D/S & D ?

my ex and i wanted to open a movie theater/restaurant establishment similar to nitehawk in brooklyn and one of our menu items was going to be the "Pauline Kale salad." this plan never really got off the ground.

ramp it up again haha

i remain agnostic on kael but ugh @ that esquire article, repellent example of sycophantic interviewer sucking up to celebrity subject

So why the animus toward Streep? (I was generally down with it)

http://vidiocy.com/post/74848476123/meryl-streep-vs-pauline-kael

haha is calling meryl streep performances artificial really the kind of aberrant crime that requires this much psychological speculation, she wasn't a serial killer

Ultimately, her criticisms of Streep could conceivably be about a lot of things, but particularly in hindsight, they hardly seem to have anything to do with Meryl Streep. Here, as was so often the case, Pauline Kael’s true subject may have been Pauline Kael.

like this seems rly insulting to me

Not understanding the critical fuss over Streep's early performances is one of the few things on which Kael and I agree thee days. Streep's acting started to loosen with The Bridges of Madison County, which is still one of her best perfs.

I mean, her line about Streep – "She's made a career out of being miscast" – was otm

I'd put it at A Cry in the Dark xp

that one's good too because her tics merged with the character she was playing (a fussy, shadowy woman whose motives are suspect).

Just glanced at it very quickly and this jumped out:

Kael first noticed Streep in The Deer Hunter, and actually singled the actress out for praise (calling her “a real beauty...(who) doesn’t do anything standard; everything seems fresh”) in what was otherwise an incensed pan of Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War film.

I'm at work and can't check her full review, but from memory, I'm sure that's wrong. A line from the online blurb:

And because the director, Michael Cimino, plays them out on such a vast canvas, the film has an inchoate, stirring quality. It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood action pictures, yet it's an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life-poetry of the commonplace.

She thought it was nuts, and it is, but clearly she thought it was a sometimes stunning piece of filmmaking. And it is.

good work; can't say i'm suprised, cuz it's Karina Longworth.

Kael first noticed Streep in The Deer Hunter, and actually singled the actress out for praise (calling her “a real beauty...(who) doesn’t do anything standard; everything seems fresh”) in what was otherwise an incensed pan of Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War film

That's really in there. Also, "it's a testament to Meryl Streep's heroic resources as a mime that she makes herself felt - she has practically no lines."

I just finished it. I'm not taken with critical writing that speculates on motives, but that's my peculiarity.

in another words, the entire Armond White thread? (critical writing about critics' motives, that is.)