Pauline Kael

Brilliant, contrarian, made film criticism exciting.

Loved her.

Most people aren't any of those (or any other) extreme things and probably Pauline Kael wasn't either.

I'm close to sixty and between the late sixties and the late eighties I was a huge fan of Kael's. I read her every column in The New Yorker, bought her books, and was very (undoubtedly overly) influenced by her opinions.

In retrospect, she was overrated and had a ridiculous number of blind spots. Nevertheless, she was undeniably smart, often very funny, and had a flair for the clever, memorable phrase.

I often don't agree with her old opinions anymore, yet she did open my eyes to a lot of films I wouldn't have known about otherwise.

As far as her personal life, she sounds like she was an annoying oddball, but honestly, who isn't/wasn't?

I could have written R2's post. Agreed with it completely.

The important thing is that she got people to see movies that they never would have watched and to pay attention to actors who weren't getting a lot of acclaim.

She was never a pawn of publicists--she just didn't give a damn about anyone's opinion but her own. This made her (on occasion) very infuriating, but it was also the reason people read her.

With r2. R3, I'm not so sure about her not being a pawn. Remember her failed stint with Paramount? Before that, she was basically Beatty's lap dog; after that, she was critical of Reds, and knowing the history, it came across a bit like sour grapes.

As the one talking head said in Life Itself, the Roger Ebert movie:

"Fuck Pauline Kael!"

I began reading the New Yorker in her later years and she seemed to be dementing--very confused and convoluted in her thinking. I looked ta some of here earlier writing and it often was a mess, too. She tended to overwrite. Her main influences on other critics seemed to be a willingness to not like obvious Oscar bait or films whose appeal was based on being foreign; OTOH, she was a fan of new film makers and was a fan of things that offended some members of her generation.

I think she was a wonderful critic, but I also think Renata Adler was completely right in her famous take-down.

Kael was blinded by her desire to influence artists. Her "pre-view" of Nashville to support Altman (because she did not think that Gilliat would in her review), and her willingness to shill for her favorites and get co-opted by the studios are profound flaws. But she was a great critic who brought to the foreground types of filmgoing pleasure that were dismissed before.

She had a lot of massive girl crushes, the most obvious one being on Debra Winger.

I'm 52, and a movie enthusiast since childhood, and so I was very aware of her presence.

She was in the right place at the right time. The film culture of the 1960s and 1970s was tremendous. For a time she and Vincent Canby of The New York Times really were influential. Movies could become successful based on their favorable reviews.

Brian Kellow's biography of her explores and exposes her egotistical dark side.

Her bombastic reviews of Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, and Diner, are enduring testaments to her talents and the power of her advocacy during that era.

Despite her flaws and excesses, she along with Roger Ebert are the film critics that are, and will be the most remembered.

Hated her. She never had one correct review of a movie, was a contrarian for that sake, alone. She knew nothing about film. Not only did I disagree (as anyone with a brain did) with what she wrote, she was simply full of horseshit. Her academic pretense was nothing but a big eye roll.

Remind me dearies, what did she say about M?

R10 is foaming at the mouth. No, not one, not even one correct review. In her whole writing career. Not one. Check for rabies.

R9 I always preferred Canby to Kael and still do. He was sharp and opinionated without being overly bitter, wasn't afraid to go against the flow and yet wasn't contrarian for the sake of it, didnt often have overt pet favorties (Woody Allen excepted) and just in general his taste lined up with mine a lot more often. And you didn't get the impression that he was jerking off to his own writing,

I also loved Denby (even when I didn't agree with him) back when he was at NYMag - he lost something once he went over to the New Yorker.

Owen Gleibermann was also one of the best before EW totally cut his balls off.

Canby was a better critic.

[quote]Not only did I disagree (as anyone with a brain did) with what she wrote,

My, that does cover a lot of territory. Every single person in the world who had a brain agreed with you on movies and disagreed with her? That must have been so comforting.

[R10] What is a "correct" review? Most people who don't practice the arts they write about are incorrect by definition. As Kael, a preposterous self promoting phony, was to prove by her disastrous attempt to make movies, she hadn't a clue, not a single clue about what works, why it works, the "how" of a project. She was like the moronic music reviewer who never catches when an instrument or singer is out of tune, forgets important parts of what they are doing, is wrong rhythmically. And who, when put in front of a score, can't read it or make sense of it. There is no way these cretins are "correct".

She pandered to a certain hipster taste of the time, fellating her readers, and pushing their narcissistic buttons. She made sure SHE was the focus of her rambling, inchoate and ignorant carrying on. Her "brand" was what mattered.

She was part of a disastrous trend in America that we see now in the "pundit" culture. Admirers of a given art form need not take responsibility for becoming informed enough about it to arrive at reasonable and defensible opinions all by themselves, without a guru or high priestess. Those who vote can assign their ability to think, understand and analyze to ax grinding, self promoting "experts", all for sale.

Inevitably, people will vary about what they think, how enthusiastic they are. An opinion giver, whether it's a homophobic fag hag like Kael (indeed, she was both), or your next door neighbor is not "correct" or "incorrect" in liking a particular artifact, unless they are one of a very few writers who have achieved some prominence in a society of idiots, who have a specialized understanding of the "how" in a particular art form and indeed, literally are "correct" about the technical miscalculations in a given work.

And so what? they are "correct" only in that limited sense; one may still "like" or "love" work that from some perspectives is flawed.

There was a book that came out a number of years ago that compared Kael and Sontag as two very different kinds of criticism--with Kael the enthusiast coming out ahead of Sontag the pedant in the author's eyes. Kael was awfully fun to read for many years, but she also became predictable --in her very effort to be unpredictable or, as someone above put it, contrarian. You could count on her to praise the gaudy and vulgar and wax eloquent over the 1930s days of Warner Bros, while taking down any real effort by a filmmaker to reach beyond the lowest sensations of the medium. Her influence remains strong (Anthony Lane, anyone--a pale fire indeed), but I think it's beginning to ebb. I read her books and magazine reviews like popcorn, but I'm not sure I actually learned much or had my own thoughts challenged. As much of a narcissistic peacock as Sontag could be, she did take the place of the arts in life and society seriously--too seriously at moments, I grant you--but there was a genuine mind at work there. Kael always seemed to be working through private grievances or neuroses in public fora--fun to witness, but at moments a bit embarrassing.

Fuck that old, raggedy-ass dead Ho.

Towards her twilight, more often wrong than not. Her vicious, petty diatribe against The Exorcist (for instance) was simply an exercise in pedantic, verbal diarrhea and showed just how far off her (and her fanboys') finger was from the pulse of cutting-edge American cinema in 1973...

Ebert's fatuous negative review of the 1994 UK gay film [italic]Priest[/italic] and his championing of former [italic]Facts of Life[/italic] writer Paul Haggis' [italic]Crash[/italic] to help steal the Best Picture Oscar that rightfully belonged to [italic]Brokeback Mountain[/italic] made me lose a lot of respect for him. There was a very good YouTube takedown video, but it's been taken down. He failed as a screenwriter with the embarrassingly bad [italic]Beyond the Valley of the Dolls[/italic], a movie so bad Fox kept out of circulation for a long time along with the almost-as-bad-but-still-better-than-that-POS [italic]Myra Breckinridge[/italic], and he took out his frustration on people far more talented than he, i.e., anyone who could still get a job in Hollywood. I knew he was quite often wrong when I learned he liked [italic]Benji the Hunted[/italic], a film four-year-old me slept through soundly. His rants against 3D video games outed him as a cultural fuddy-duddy who refuses to open his mind to the potential of new art forms. He also supported the corporate censorship of [italic]Song of the South[/italic] while calling it a classic when reviewing another Disney film early in his career. He will not be missed.

R10: Pauline was only right every once in awhile. She was contrarian just for its own sake. Film scholar Ray Carney called her "a connoisseur of kitsch" and "consistently stupid and wrong." And when she was wrong, she was so far off it wasn't funny. And she would gladly use the implication of homosexuality as an insult if it suited her (her "sexless pixie" comment about David Tomlinson's character in [italic]Bedknobs and Broomsticks[/italic], who spends much of the film making passes at Angela Lansbury, was hate speech as far as I'm concerned. Pixie = fairy = gay slur). She also called [italic]2001: A Space Odyssey[/italic] a glorified home movie. Seriously?

Face it: no critic is right 100% of the time. People put too much stock in critics' opinions because they're insecure about their own judgement.

[quote]There was a very good YouTube takedown video

of what? Ebert on Crash?

Pauline Kael was much better than that royal stick-in-the-mud Dave Kehr from the Chicago Reader. Reading excerpts from his reviews on Rotten Tomatoes grates on my nerves.

Kael was a great but deeply flawed critic. What was great about her is her fine eye for important new talent, her extraordinarily deep and comprehensive knowledge of American film, her indefatigable opposition to middlebrow pablum, and her energetic championing of film as a great mass art. She was highly influential and really helped people see film in a new way. Also, as sheer writing, her reviews were wonderful -- so witty, readable, and even, at her best, exciting.

But as a critic, Kael was also very problematic. It's not so much that she could be very wrong about this or that film -- that's to be expected, because no critic is always right, and half the fun in reading great criticism is figuring out where you part company with the critic, and why. What's most troubling is how narrow and excessively dogmatic she ended up being.

For one thing, though she started out reviewing lots of foreign films, by the end of her career she rarely ventured far afield of Hollywood and the better known American indies. By being so Anglo-centric, she missed a *lot* of important films (like the ones coming out of places like Iran, China, Hong Kong, etc., for example).

There were also lots of great American and European directors that simply get (Sirk and Bresson, for example). Her sensibility was sadly limited in many respects.

I also found it super-weird that she claimed to never see a film more than once. But to me, an important part of being a filmgoer is seeing films again. Only by re-viewing films do you learn which ones stand up and which ones don't. Also, there are films I didn't get at all the first time, but that opened themselves up to me years later, on second (or third) viewing.

To be truly open to art, you need a flexible attitude and willingness to rethink and reconsider. But Kael was never, ever capable of that. I think she didn't question her own judgments and reactions enough. That limits the value of her criticism. She was far too invested in the idea that her initial reaction had to be the "correct" one.

So, all in all, a mixed bag. That said, she was, along with James Agee, Manny Farber, and a few others, one of the essential American film critics.

I enjoyed some of her writing but I turned on her when she started privately advocating for directors and producers to hire certain actors, and had delusions herself of becoming a Hollywood player. Criticism is basically air guitar, you are not in the band and yet she crossed boundaries with people in the business all the time. Wasn't she also depressive and an alcoholic? Not on my pedestal.

[quote]of what? Ebert on Crash?

It was called "Roger Ebert Was an Asshole" and it was a very good takedown of the most assholic things he did in his later years. Like his tweet after [italic]Jackass[/italic]'s Ryan Dunn died in a car accident. He was an Internet troll with good connections.

Pauline was actually a "creative consultant" at Paramount for a few months in the early 1980s. It was disastrous. Those who can do and all that.

[quote]There is no way these cretins are "correct".

Analysis of a text [italic]in no way[/italic] requires someone to be able to produce the exact same text prior to the analysis. Done properly, criticism is an art of its own, adding to the cultural property of an artwork without taking away from the art itself.

Art is what exists in the wacky, intangible space between the art product itself, the artist and the audience/consumer. There's room in that equation for the critic, the analyst, and the educated enthusiast.

If the audience is "allowed" to form an opinion on the art, then the critic is, too. Full stop.

[quote]He was an Internet troll with good connections.

Ain't that the truth. He wrote a blog post about his friend Jeff Dowd, who literally chased some guy down at a film festival, cornering him multiple times, interrupting his meals, stalking him, demanding he watch some movie Dowd was promoting. The guy finally punched Dowd to get him to leave him alone, and Dowd punched back and hurt him.

Ebert crowed on and on about how great his friend Dowd was, because he could beat people up. The guy who got stalked was made fun of for a year because of all the Ebert fangurls.

Then there were all the films Ebert didn't watch but reviewed anyway. Once he died, people would praise Ebert for being an ethical critic, but no, ethical critics don't write reviews for films they haven't seen.

[quote]Towards her twilight, more often wrong than not. Her vicious, petty diatribe against The Exorcist (for instance) was simply an exercise in pedantic, verbal diarrhea and showed just how far off her (and her fanboys') finger was from the pulse of cutting-edge American cinema in 1973...

Now that I agree with her on. [italic]The Exorcist[/italic] is obscenely overrated and once I learned William Peter Blatty was a bigot, I forgave William Freidkin for [italic]Cruising[/italic] (which is still not a good movie). If it weren't for people like Blatty, that movie never would have happened in the first place because gay people would never have been forced to go underground in the first place.

She had abysmal taste in actresses, and was secretly jealous of me, because I was blonde and WASPy and oh so patrician.

explain r29. Why'd you forgive Friedkin?

R29, regardless of Blatty's despicably homophobic views, it is difficult to argue against the brilliance of The Exorcist (a film 1,000,000 times since imitated but never duplicated). Kael was witty and her critiques often cut with the precision of a scalpel (in a good way), but she was an absolute moron when it came to a few masterpieces that lay right before her eyes. How anyone could dismiss Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as anything but brilliant is a marvel.

Sometimes the old bag was contrary just to be contrary.

[quote]her "sexless pixie" comment about David Tomlinson's character in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, who spends much of the film making passes at Angela Lansbury, was hate speech as far as I'm concerned.

This isn't the first time you've angrily defended David Tomlinson in "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" from that phrase of Kael's on DL. Did you really find him a throbbing tower of virile masculine lust when he sang "Eglantine"? If so, what drugs were you taking?

He is absolutely, undeniably, utterly, and incontrovertibly a "sexless pixie" in that movie.

What nasty things did she say about Meryl? Anyone have links? Printouts? Were they really viscious and cruel?

[quote]it is difficult to argue against the brilliance of The Exorcist

Oh, [italic]honey.[/italic]

R35, please offer your brilliant critique as to why the Exorcist should be anything less than an American horror classic?

We all eagerly await, darling.

[quote]He is absolutely, undeniably, utterly, and incontrovertibly a "sexless pixie" in that movie.

Agreed. It's also worth noting that none of the three children ever made another film.

For those interested, here is Kael's review of The Exorcist:

One of Kael’s unforgivable sins as a [supposedly] impartial film critic was the obvious and personal vendettas she held against actors, directors and writers that she simply did not like for whatever reason. Rather than be even-handed and compliment them on things that they did, in fact, do well, the object of her scorn simply could not do anything right! She was very black and white; often moralistic; very good vs. evil. This makes her critiques very difficult to swallow nowadays.

[quote]This isn't the first time you've angrily defended David Tomlinson in "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" from that phrase of Kael's on DL.

And it won't be the last because it's just an offensive comment in any context. She basically gay-bashed a not-particularly-butch heterosexual character played by a heterosexual actor. That's how deep her homophobia ran.

[quote]Did you really find him a throbbing tower of virile masculine lust when he sang "Eglantine"?

Not at all, but the character isn't written that way to begin with, and to cast a stereotypically virile "man's man" would be miscasting for someone whose ladies' man façade is a mask for his insecurity, just like all heterosexual males. Consider that the only competition for Miss Price's affections is Roddy freaking McDowall. Also consider this is from the same studio that tried make Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello the Rock Hudson and Doris Day of the teenybopper crowd; two of the films they made happen to be from the same director, Robert Stevenson. B&B seems like kitchen sink realism in comparison.

[quote]If so, what drugs were you taking?

One that caused me to realize that gay men don't go around hitting on women, even in Disney films.

But at least you posted the complete version of the song, R33, which Kael didn't see (nor did she see most of McDowall's part save the 30 seconds the studio left in to justify his third-billing) due to the sloppy, unnecessary wholesale cuts to which the studio subjected the film (which better critics than she noticed and pointed out). No matter how self-loathing Paulettes defend her, she was still a homophobe and the comment is still offensive. Her sexual desires were guiding her choices more often than necessary. Some of her other reviews were even worse.

[quote]He is absolutely, undeniably, utterly, and incontrovertibly a "sexless pixie" in that movie.

That's the only way heterosexuality should be depicted on film: as chaste as possible with all sexual desire only hinted at and not actually shown. It's different for gays because of all the things we have been subjected to over the years. The so-called "New Hollywood" was very unequal when it came to the "freedom" to depict sexuality on screen. Str8 sex was shoved down our throats. Disney, of course, rejected it and I'm glad they did because I cannot tolerate any depiction of heterosexuality more salacious than what Disney will allow. Pauline, on the other hand, seemed to use her libido to guide her more often than not. The cuts to this film also deprived us of an 8-second shot of two women dancing together with their arms around each other on Portobello Road.

Kael was a terrible critic and a cruel, mean-spirited woman.

[quote]Agreed. It's also worth noting that none of the three children ever made another film.

Wrong. Cindy O'Callaghan has several other credits.

[quote]please offer your brilliant critique as to why the Exorcist should be anything less than an American horror classic?

When I saw the film, it wasn't scary. In fact, it made me laugh out loud. What's scary is what the Catholic Church does in real life, and this film is propaganda for that cult. Friedkin's best film is [italic]The Boys in the Band[/italic], and Blatty's recent comments about gays make the entire [italic]Exorcist[/italic] franchise unwatchable. That Kael got it right was merely proof of the stopped clock adage.

R33: John Ericson, who played the head Nazi in that film, did a Playgirl spread three years later:

Was there any movie that snobby, pretentious old bitch liked?

[quote]Was there any movie that snobby, pretentious old bitch liked?

IIRC, she liked [italic]Oliver![/italic] though she admitted she walked out of the original stage show. I've seen the show twice and the movie is superior.

She loved Debra Winger in anything.

Having watched an old movie it's fun to take down PK from the shelf and read her reaction.

It doesn't matter whether one agrees with her; PK's fully-engaged essays enrich the effect of having enjoyed a movie.

PK also offers a glimpse into the mood of the times at the film's opening. Her reviews have the merit (and vulnerability) of freshness, as against the condescension of history.

Unlike with a fine theatre critic such as Tynan, we can comfortably point out where PK would seem to have got it very wrong: which is part of the fun.

And when she has delighted us enough, old PK can be put back on the shelf, till next time. Not a bad afterlife for a journalist.

One could argue the same about Armond White.

R7: Was this the article you were talking about?

Exactly, r46. The Library of America doesn't seem to be rushing to publish the collected reviews of Judith Crist or Vincent Canby.

In the days when Kael was at the New Yorker, we would rush to read her work. How many critics in any art form enjoy that kind of fervor today?

If even now she can instill the kind of vitriol on both sides as represented here tells me she must have been doing something right.

[quote]If even now she can instill the kind of vitriol on both sides as represented here tells me she must have been doing something right.

Holding Hollywood hostage to her philistine tastes while her acolytes continue to spread toxicity to every corner of the cinematic world is not much of an achievement. Roger Ebert at least actually made a movie. In that, he's a reverse François Truffault: a former critic who became a filmmaker. But at least Truffault never felt schadenfreude over the death of a TV star in a car accident.

I can't think of a single American film critic who has influenced filmmakers in the same way as Kael. When you have filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Paul Schrader, Wes Anderson and many others citing you as one of their heroes, then that alone solidifies your place as one of the greats -- if not the greatest. Tarantino said that reading her reviews was his film school. Not to mention her influence on current critics is still felt to this day.

R49 is right, she was the first film critic whose work was collected and published by the prestigious Library of America. That alone signifies that she was certainly above the rest.

R49/R51, please don't try to convince the "anti-DL" folk of anything. For them to hate someone that person can never, ever have done anything good. Gradations do not exist. Kael, Streep, whoever.

[quote]Tarantino said that reading her reviews was his film school.

I thought working in a video store and cribbing notes from old B-movies nobody had ever heard of was his film school.

Kael's shilling for her pets and her riding her bete noirs, is probably the most annoying thing about her.

Have you all seen Veronica Geng's great parody?

I never liked her. I rarely agreed with anything she said. I thought her critiques were just strange. She had a bizarre way of looking at things. And for some reason in almost all her reviews she would bring up some other movie or actor or actress that had nothing to do with the subject at hand. I guess she did that for comparison, but it added nothing. It was just damned annoying.

She disliked "American Graffiti", one of the best movies ever made. She said the scenes that featured Paul Le Matt (John Milner) and Charlie Martin Smith (Terry the Toad) were the worst ones in the film; everyone I knew who saw the movie said the John and Terry storylines were the best in the movie. She also said the film was chauvinistic and anti-woman because it didn't tell the fates of the female characters at the end. What crap!

The anti-Ebert list at R25 is mostly bitching by conservatives.

He was imperfect, and the middle of his career got bloated with the mainstreaming of the TV review program.

But the last five years of his writing were glorious, and transcendent. And his reviews were always grounded in how a movie made him feel, not a lot of up-one's-own-ass academic posturing.

From R54:

[quote]Redford doesn’t have their gutter appeal; neither does Newman, who’s a fop, or Burt Reynolds, who’s a mincing synthetic stud.

What a spot-on parody.

She was the Antichrist, which is the only explanation for her disliking "The Exorcist" and for her not understanding "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" for the lusty romp it truly was.

One of the silliest, if not THE silliest, persons that ever lived. To take her seriously is the height of folly. Who is the comic book critic for the New Yorker?

She was dead right about The Exorcist. A shitty film made of greed, avarice, and with just money in mind.

Just because you want to be fucked by a crucifix doesn't make the film a masterpiece.

[quote]She loved Debra Winger in anything.

I don't think she liked her in "The Sheltering Sky," but I could be wrong.

But Winger was wonderful at her best.

I don't think she ever criticized Brando, Jeff Bridges, or Jean Renoir. Her alleged pets (Altman, Streisand, Scorcese, DePalma) came in for a lot of criticism.

I read a couple of her reviews and thought she was clueless. Last Tango in Paris review in particular.

I just remembered that after she stopped at The New Yorker, she told someone that The River Wild was great for kids. She had taken a nephew or whatever.

Major hero. Could always count on her to scoff at films we were "supposed" to like (even "Shoah") and to champion actors that others didn't get (Nancy Allen, etc.)

Love her noting that "Rain Man" is two hours of Dustin Hoffman humping the same note on the piano. Love her warning actors that "what Susan Seidelman does to Rosanna Arquette in this movie could happen to you next" (it did, to Streep, in fact). Loved her saying that Streep can't take a bite of food without acting out eating -- though I disagree.

She had wit and her own sensibility and was part of the greatest period of film in my lifetime anyway. She'd vomit at what's out there now. RIP Ms. Kael.

She was a contrarian, but she didn't take it to trolling levels unlike people like Camille Paglia, Armond White and Skip Bayless - or did she?

One of the nuttier Kael moments was this passage from her review of the Italian film A Special Day starring Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni:

"When the housewife tenderly begins to make love to the homosexual and puts his hand on her magnificent melon breast, it's embarrassingly tasteful, Your first thought may be [italic]Pizza and Sympathy[/italic], but it's your next that's fatal. The man lies there politely, joylessly; his face is drawn, tense, utterly still. How can you have any feeling for a man who doesn't enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren? You lose any interest in [him] afterward."

Pauline Kael? Don't get me started on her . . .

Have to thank The New Yorker for giving her the space and the support for those long pieces. I appreciated her championing of artists like De Palma, Bertolucci, Debra Winter ( read her review of Mike’s Murder, a movie that’s disappeared) Peckinpah and Altman. I appreciated her pin pricking of inflated films and filmmakers.

I disagree R64. I think she would love lots of today's stuff. She was a great advocate of fast, bright, violent and superficial movies. She made celebrating what were then considered low brow things fashionable.

Antisocial housefrau who said exactly what she thought, kinda lost her marbles at around the 1980s.