Pauline Kael, RIP.

greil marcus is my biggest fan, so i have to love him. i agree about denby though. he's pretty useless.

here is all this stuff that doesn't work, but wait, here is five minutes or five seconds that does! i would study that five minutes or five seconds if i was a director.

the flipside of this is how in her longer pieces, she'd point out the five minutes in some film she adored that didn't work. Nobody got through unscathed.

when I was reading all her stuff in school (so glad the library had all the essay books), I felt like I wanted to see almost EVERY movie she wrote a long piece about, good or bad, because I wanted to experience what she had.

My favorite of her ambivalent reviews of films she loved is The Conformist. For a few pages it sounds like she's describing a masterpiece, until she raises her hand: "I don't think it's a great film." It's too enamoured of fascist kitsch, etc.

I have the blurb compendium, and it doesn't have that same effect (also I'm suffering from some video store burnout). I'm looking forward to picking up all the books eventually and seeing if it still has hold.

x-post

has THAT hold.

I rented the Conformist the other week but didn't get around to watching it! I can barely seem to get through anything these days.

xpost: I trudged through every Jessica Lange and Joseph Ruben film thanks to her.

It pisses me off that she prefers Ghostbusters II to the original.

Yeah, that was batty. There are some pretty banal comedies she likes cuz they've got the spirit of the good ol' days, like Caveman.

i.e. lots of Bette Midler movies.

i was just reading the snooze new yorker parody book. did you ever read the kael parody in there? she's pauline zeal though.

here's something that artforum published when she died - lol @ gary indiana

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-84182767.html

I've never understood that idea of liking Kael for her writing style but finding her opinions inscrutable.

yeah her opinions aren't hard to understand -- i think she makes good, clear cases for stuff she loves or hates. which is obviously different from agreeing with her, but she's not inscrutable.

Yeah, her detractors are usually taken aback by those royal "we's" and "you's" and other bludgeoning tactics of her early style that they forget how serenely clear the "middle period" (1970-1980) was, and how willing she was to be persuaded by the particular kind of hackery coming from Hollywood in the eighties. Isn't this what we want from critics? I can't understand how they must attach so many qualifiers ("great writer even though I don't agree", yawn).

*are usually SO taken aback

the comments re: welles upthread are missing the point. of course welles was responsible (mostly) for not getting to make another film after "f for fake." but kael's "raising kane" is a big old pudding of lazy criticism and outright calumnies. yes, it's got some great insights, but that doesn't excuse the sloppiness of the piece.

We acknowledged as such.

*much. I really can't type tonight.

anybody ever read renata adler's legendary takedown in the ny review of books - "perils of pauline"??

Yup. Adler's flummoxed by Kael's slang.

haha yes! it's a fantastic piece of writing and analysis, listing in excruciating and hilarious detail every last weird thing about kael's writing. even fans (and i'm a bit one, despite my criticism of "raising kane") should check it out.

uh, i'm a BIG one, that is. not "a bit of one."

Is Atkinson using the word "feckless" correctly?

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f163/courtneykaehler/maracas.jpg

At what, the feckless boxer?

Stumped.