"Trash has given us an appetite for art."
December 7, 2014 12:48 PM   Subscribe

 
Kael wasn't a great critic because she was always right, or even mostly right, or possibly even *ever* right. What made her great was her enthusiasm for movies. After you read one of her reviews you wanted to go watch a movie.
posted by acrasis at 1:09 PM on December 7, 2014 [3 favorites]


A pretty comprehensive demolition of Pauline Kael, perhaps the most overrated movie reviewer ever.
posted by yoink at 1:22 PM on December 7, 2014 [6 favorites]


Reading one of her essays makes me want to watch every single movie she ever disliked, just to spite her.
posted by KHAAAN! at 1:23 PM on December 7, 2014 [3 favorites]


When you're as good a writer as Pauline Kael was it's enough to hear her point of view for a different perspective. Otherwise we end up living in an echo tank.
posted by Nevin at 1:30 PM on December 7, 2014


I grew up reading Pauline Kael's reviews, and still appreciate her observation about "Rain Man": "[T]he picture has its effectiveness: people are crying at it. Of course they're crying at it - it's a piece of wet kitsch."
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:19 PM on December 7, 2014


That site reminds me that 1995's Web is gone for a reason.
posted by jscalzi at 2:25 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]


Kael, the hero of haters everywhere. She got paid to do what so many of us do for free. Wherever she is now, I'm sure she finds it trite and low-brow.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:28 PM on December 7, 2014 [3 favorites]


A pretty comprehensive demolition of Pauline Kael, perhaps the most overrated movie reviewer ever.

Not really a demolition -- just a bad review of her later work (specifically 1975-1980, later than most of the pieces linked here).

The same review describes her as singularly talented -- at the beginning of her career, she "seemed to approach movies with an energy and a good sense that were unmatched at the time in film criticism." And once she went weekly, "there were often fine columns that could be the work of no one else." But it concludes that she fell prey to the risk of being a staff writer -- "to stay put and simply to inflate, to pretend that each day’s text is after all a crisis—the most, first, best, worst, finest, meanest, deepest, etc.—to take on, since we are dealing in superlatives, one of the first, most unmistakable marks of the hack."

It makes me wonder what on earth we would talk about around here if we ever discovered that every day's text was not in fact a crisis.
posted by jhc at 2:42 PM on December 7, 2014 [5 favorites]


I understand and at least half agree with the criticisms of Kael but when I was a teenager her writing really open my eyes to the idea that film could be art, even genre film. Also that criticism could be an art to itself and how bad and superficial most movie reviewers were at the time.
posted by octothorpe at 2:46 PM on December 7, 2014 [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!” Johnson looks so fierce among a cast of scrawny beat cops that we imagine no force in the rest of the movie could tangle with him: this guy could eat two of those flying saucers for breakfast. So when the most magnetic character in the picture does, in fact, meet his match, nothing could be tenser. Maybe no death on the screen has had such emotional wallop since “The Passion of Joan of Arc”.
(Kael's "lost" review of Plan 9 From Outer Space, excerpted by Chris Stangl from Going Down on the Movies.)
posted by Iridic at 2:47 PM on December 7, 2014 [5 favorites]


I sure enjoyed her various understandings, and her ability to communicate in an organized and cognizant way. I bet directors and the industry dreaded her until they realized most movie goers would not understand her.
posted by Oyéah at 2:57 PM on December 7, 2014


I can't forgive her for her hatchet job of Citizen Kane.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 5:01 PM on December 7, 2014


That nyrb thing mainly cooks up a word cloud and performs cartoonish Freudian analysis on it. Meh. Kael was a philosopher. I actually kinda love some of John Simon's stuff too though. His ridiculing of Star Wars is great.

Man, from the first link, the review of Stop Making Sense makes me wanna see that again.
posted by batfish at 5:57 PM on December 7, 2014


That site reminds me that 1995's Web is gone for a reason.

So - content is not king?
posted by IndigoJones at 6:30 PM on December 7, 2014


IIRC, her review of Star Wars said that it was "a box of Cracker Jacks that is all prizes," which is just about right.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:39 PM on December 7, 2014


That Raising Kane essay has been pretty well debunked by Paul Bogdanovich, Robert Carringer, and others. Not sure why Kael chose Orson Welles as a sacrificial victim for her anti-auteur theory crusade, since she liked Chimes of Midnight so much just a few years earlier, but that was an unprovoked and unwarranted attack on a guy whose chips were down.
posted by Mothlight at 7:30 PM on December 7, 2014 [2 favorites]




...because you've got to link to the (interesting, including-warts-and-all) piece about Kael if you're linking to the Five Classic Kael Reviews piece in the same publication by the same writer.
posted by Lyme Drop at 12:24 AM on December 8, 2014


IIRC, her review of Star Wars said that it was "a box of Cracker Jacks that is all prizes," which is just about right.

Whether she was a hero or a hack, she could pen a phrase that would stick in your mind.

"Is there anything sadder -- and ultimately more repellent -- than a clean-minded pornographer?", from her review of Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange." When she didn't understand a movie, boy did she really not understand it. Those reviews, or rather lengthy testaments to her cluelessness, were fun to read. By the end of them, you would feel she couldn't possibly be more off-base.

But when she was "on" and at the top of her form she could be very good.
posted by cwest at 5:52 AM on December 8, 2014


Kael was a philosopher

I think Kael herself would laugh at that proposition. Her critical language is entirely about things either hitting you in the gut or failing to do so; she pretends to no 'philosophy' of film and was deeply suspicious of anyone who advanced one. That's part, of course, of why any discussion of Kael tends to gravitate towards "hang on, why did she hate this film when she loved this basically identical film?"

Kael was, for a time, an entertaining stylist who quite rapidly devolved into a rehasher of dreary cliches. Her total contribution to film theory was "there are some films I like, and some I don't like. The end."
posted by yoink at 8:57 AM on December 9, 2014


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