This Recording compiles their favorite Pauline Kael actor descriptions

October 18, 2011 6:16 AM

This Recording compiles their favorite Pauline Kael descriptions of actors. Part 1 Part 2
posted by Cloud King (12 comments total)

Lisa Bonet: as fresh as the gardenia in Billie Holiday's hair
posted by Trurl at 6:27 AM on October 18, 2011

MML: Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic.

This Recording is a blog(?) "dedicated to the enjoyment of audio and visual stimuli."
posted by zamboni at 7:57 AM on October 18, 2011 [2 favorites]

Sad to say I agree completely with her opinions on Meryl Streep.

Thanks for pointing the way to This Recording, I'd never heard of it before.
posted by dumdidumdum at 8:03 AM on October 18, 2011

I wish they'd provided a link to her review of Blade Runner. If she's considered wrong on that, I can only imagine how blazingly right she was.
posted by DU at 8:10 AM on October 18, 2011

I wish they'd provided a link to her review of Blade Runner.

I think it's here (scroll down to find it in the list)

Blade Runner
US (1982): Science Fiction
118 min, Rated R, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc

Ridley Scott's futuristic thriller is set in a hellish, claustrophobic city, dark and polluted, and with a continual drenching rainfall-it's Los Angeles in the year 2019. The congested-megalopolis sets are extraordinary: this is the grimy, retrograde future-the future as a black market, made up of scrambled, sordid aspects of the present. A visionary sci-fi movie that has its own look can't be ignored: it has its place in film history. But you're always aware of the sets as sets-it's 2019 back lot. And the movie forces passivity on you. It puts you in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post-human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Harrison Ford is the blade runner-a police officer who kills "replicants," the powerful humanoids manufactured by genetic engineers, if they rebel against their drudgery in the space colonies and show up on Earth. He tracks down four of these replicants (Brion James; Joanna Cassidy; Daryl Hannah, who has killer thighs and does a punk variation on Olympia, the doll automaton of The Tales of Hoffmann; and the blue-eyed scenery-chewer Rutger Hauer), but Ford's mission seems of no particular consequence. The whole movie gives you the feeling of not getting anywhere-of being part of the atmosphere of decay. With Sean Young as Rachael and William Sanderson as the toymaker. From the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick; adapted by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Produced by Michael Deeley; a Ladd Company Release (in association with Run Run Shaw), through Warners.

(For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In.)

posted by memebake at 8:22 AM on October 18, 2011

Yeah, the "more extended discussion" is the piece that was published in the New Yorker. That's the actual review.
posted by koeselitz at 8:37 AM on October 18, 2011

(The little blurb is okay, just really brief.)
posted by koeselitz at 8:38 AM on October 18, 2011

I'm a huge huge fan of Blade Runner and yet I also pretty much agree with everything Kael had to say about it. She was a damn good film critic.
posted by Doleful Creature at 8:42 AM on October 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

Burly Tor Johnson plays Inspector Clay as a giant in body and spirit. He’s one of those fellows that was built for underlings to scurry beneath and hang by their fingernails from his every word. The big man gives off erotic energy like an oil drum on fire, even when no women are around. When he laughs off danger, chuckling to a pal “I’m a big boy now, Johnny!,” we half expect Johnny to sigh “don’t I know it!”

From Kael's lost review of Plan 9 From Outer Space.
posted by Iridic at 8:44 AM on October 18, 2011

"Tor Johnson" and "erotic energy" on the same webpage?
posted by DU at 8:46 AM on October 18, 2011

Thanks for this link.

I've read the New Yorker all my life; its first writer who made a lasting impression on me was Kael. As a film critic she's perhaps #1 on my list, although her successor Anthony Lane sometimes occupies that spot, for the way his similar incisiveness is further enhanced by his laugh-out-loud (not "lol", in this case) wit (I submit his review of "Mamma Mia" as an example) to a degree that Kael lacked. She also didn't convey that sense of critic-as-fan who nonetheless doesn't lose perspective due to enthusiasm, to the degree that Roger Ebert does (the #3 on my list, if I must rank critics.)

(For the single best takedown of a bad film, I'd have to nominate Charlie Brooker in the Guardian, on the first "Transformer" movie: "It was like being pinned down for two hours while an angry dishwasher shat in your face.")

But her writings were always the precise articulation of that nagging little doubt one feels sometimes about a movie that everyone else is gushing over but for which one just can't muster the same enthusiasm. Case in point: her review of Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" as "a minor film". Everyone I knew at the time thought it was one of his best ever, but each time I've seen it since, even (and especially) allowing for the inherently deflating nature of the small screen, I've known she was right.

In part one of this link, her takedown of the auto-misogyny of "Mrs. John Doe" (presuming to tell her she'd be less mean if she only had a man) is particularly striking to me in light of its Mad Men-era dateline, as I just recently caught up on that series, with its ambivalent sense of being appalled by and (maybe not-so-)secretly celebrating the retro mores of that time, as the New Yorker's TV critic Nancy Franklin has pointed out (and, I imagine, Kael would've zeroed right in on.)
posted by Philofacts at 9:26 AM on October 18, 2011

I've always loved Pauline Kael's description of Meryl Streep (quoted in the first link): "She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast."
posted by klausness at 4:54 AM on October 19, 2011