Pauline Kael was overrated

I could not agree more

KITCH; loanword from German), also called tackiness, is art or other objects that, generally speaking, appeal to popular rather than "high art" tastes. Such objects are sometimes appreciated in a knowingly ironic or humorous way. >> what could be less heterosexist?

She was a homophobe and pulled the V-card to deny it.

The world is homophobe, especially the Africa and Middle East that SJWs love so much.

I loved reading Pauline Kael. I only agreed with her maybe 45-50% of the time. She was the most interesting writer on movies then or ever. Maybe not your taste, but she was good. She was homophobic and all that stuff, it was the 70s. If you think she was like John Simon, you're nuts.

She was a hack and she was consistently stupid and wrong, and you are an ableist piece of shit in addition to being a fucking quisling R5. And saying "it was the 1970s" does not fucking justify anything. Do you know who was also famous in the 1970s? Anita fucking Bryant.

Her writing on movies is all style, no substance, just like the same shittily bourgeois mainstream movies she championed. Someone once described her as having the same tastes as a Republican chicken farmer from Petaluma.

Many of the movies she championed didn't age well and she really didn't understand Kubrick at all. I still enjoy reading her sometimes.

She was so homophobic she made gay jokes about str8 actors.

The word "cunt" doesn't even begin to describe her:

Bronze age here. The best we got before stonewall was ignored. Anything even slightly positive was in code. Kael was readable, insightful, stimulated discussion, connected the world of film to the wider culture. Purity tests do nothing, especially when you need to fall back on name calling and invective to make a point

R9, she made fun of Andrew Sarris, implying he was gay and when they on the phone one time, she even said to him something like "oh, is your LOVER there with you", implying he had a boyfriend just to taunt him.

I did like a few of her comments.....my favorite being:

"...Lana Turner is not Madame X - she is Brand X..."

On the real Madame X, in Desperately Seeking Susan,she said "the only one who comes through is Madonna...she has amazing aplomb." She never reviewed any other movies Madonna was in.

R11: Her whole life's work was nothing but name-calling with a thesaurus.

R6, time to take your meds. We wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.

The OP sounds like another "getting a quarter for every new thread" poster. We've seen this one many times here,

Citing an unspecified Boston U. "professor," claiming we're "paying for her "misjudgments" (Why would anyone pay for a reviewer's opinions except to buy the magazine it's in? - MARY!) and hissing the "heterosexist" label are all lazy, stupid and boring attempts to stir muck.

For actual cultural relevance, how about attacking the pusillanimous impact still felt from T.S. Eliot's preciousness, or thumping a tub at the truly overrated likes of a dozen critics of the last century more influential - and peculiar - than Ms. Kael?

Bullies of the dead = SJW cunts and their male labia-warts.

R13: That shows just how much she hated other women. She was a beneficiary of heterosexual privilege, and I will not have criticisms of her idiotic and bigoted criticisms brushed away with buzzwords such as "SJW" and buzz phrases such as "purity test." Don't give me that "times were different" crap because right is right and wrong is wrong no matter what year is it. Times were even more different when [italic]Birth of a Nation[/italic] actually brought back the KKK and made it WORSE than the original. Ideology matters when it comes to art, and it's not a bad thing to acknowledge that. It's bad to deny it.

The Paulettes are still trying to suppress or str8splain away her homophobia. There's even a Wiki edit war on the page for the movie [italic]The Boys in the Band[/italic] because of her homophobia towards it.

She wasn't a "contrarian," she was just a petty selfish bitch who ruined movies forever.

Her homophobia influenced her reviews of everything, even G-rated movies. She called heterosexual actor David Tomlinson "a sexless pixie" in her review of [italic]Bedknobs and Broomsticks[/italic], a film rightly regarded by anyone with taste as a classic. Anyone who doesn't find that comment homophobic, even for 1971, is also a homophobe.

a Paulette who is far worse than even Pauline--Armond White. Dear god, this is the biggest contrarian critic who ever lived. He has 5 or so great reviews and the rest are pure polemical garbage.

[quote]For actual cultural relevance, how about attacking the pusillanimous impact still felt from T.S. Eliot's preciousness

I don't have to: the red ink on the books for the movie [italic]Cats[/italic] says it all.

Under any circumstances DO NOT post quotes from anyone that make fun of DL Icon LANA TURNER!!!

From a review of a biography released in 2011-

[quote] Not everyone was a fan. Most famously, Renata Adler attacked her in The New York Review of Books in 1980, saying that Kael's film collection "When the Lights Go Down" was "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." ....Her review of Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Holocaust documentary "Shoah" was attacked as anti-Semitic, and her 1981 review of George Cukor's "Rich and Famous" fueled criticism that she was anti-gay.

[quote] But Kael was Jewish, although she was suspicious of all religions, and three of the key relationships in her love life were with men who were gay or bisexual poets -- Robert Horan, Robert Duncan and James Broughton (with whom she had a daughter, the artist Gina James, out of wedlock in 1948). Kael kept much of her personal life private -- so much so that her obituary in The New York Times said she'd been married three times, although her new biography confirms that she was married just once (to Ed Landberg, with whom she ran the Berkeley Cinema Guild in the 1950s). As biographer Brian Kellow quotes Landberg, "I soon found out I couldn't stand this woman."

So she was a typical heterosexual woman who felt entitled to cock.

"Not everyone was a fan. Most famously, Renata Adler..."

If you don't like Kael, Renata Alder was 1000x worse.

She loved [italic]Lolita[/italic] but she hated [italic]Dr. Strangelove[/italic].

[quote]"Not everyone was a fan. Most famously, Renata Adler..." If you don't like Kael, Renata Alder was 1000x worse.

And what was I, chopped liver?

R26, she hated just about all of Kubrick's films--she just didn't get them.

She wasn’t a homophobe. She had a child with the gayest man ever - james broughton. Her anti gay reviews had more to do with how phony & phobic the movies themselves were. Theres a doc out on james broughton. I never knew why she loved brian depalma.

Forcing a gay man into a heterosexual "marriage" is homophobic. She actively tried to change him. She was projecting her own phoniness onto people more talented than she.

They weren’t married. Just a kid. She knew he liked boys. Broughton married a chick much later

In addition to her questionable attitudes towards gays, she was also dishonest and unethical. From the Alan Vannemann article:

[quote]At her best, Kael could write with wonderful enthusiasm and intelligence, but her work was marred by intellectual laziness of the most primitive kind. She was constantly inventing “friends” who would make stupid remarks, so that she could score them off and make herself look good.30 Her reports on audience reactions were almost always false, invented to set up whatever particular spin she wanted to deliver on a film or “trend.” When writing for the New Yorker, she would frequently say “Some people may be bothered by this” and go on to invent what “they” “may” have been thinking, or “probably” were thinking, or “must have been” thinking — thoughts invented to show that other people simply lacked the guts to see life steadily and see it whole — that they were no Pauline Kael.

There is no reason she should still be revered today. Another film now revered by generations as a classic, [italic]Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory[/italic], was something she dismissed as if it were made by someone who doesn't like chocolate. This was mentioned in the book about the film by its director.

Then maybe heterosexuals are not qualified to review films at all, period.

Her supporters always seem inspired by and defensive of her "energy" or "verve" or something—fine, but a refreshing, original voice doesn't cancel out uneven judgment and aggressively tendentious argumentation. And her theft of a young scholar's work for her Citizen Kane book is absolutely contemptible.

[quote]She wasn’t a homophobe. She had a child with the gayest man ever

??!!

By that logic, the mother from [italic]Small Wonder[/italic] was one of the greatest allies the gay community has ever had.

The doc is Big Joy. (About Broughton). Fun to watch.

Roger Ebert said in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades."

"I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."

I don't revere her, but always enjoyed her writing even when I don't agree with her which is frequent. Early in her career, she was one of the few critics who praised THE INNOCENTS (one of my favorite films), and for all the right reasons. She got what was so wonderful about that film in a way so many other critics of the time didn't. So she gets points for that.

I also liked that while she loved L'AAVENTURA, she was, IMO, right on the money about some of the Antonioni films that followed.

Never got her love for DePalma (she really lost me on DRESSED TO KILL, which I think is just dumb, however "stylish"),nor her praise for certain Altman films (McCABE & MRS, MILLER and THE LONG GOODBYE).

R38, I think that quote was revealed to made up, wasn't it?

[quote] Roger Ebert said in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades."

Says the man who helped reduce the complexity of expressing ideas about film to a simple "thumbs up" and "thumbs down." Ebert was an old fuddy-duddy when it came to things like 3-D and video games. It's not the technology's fault if it's used badly.

R39, I think Antonioni is another director she didn't get after L'AAVENTURA.

Most of those European new wave films haven't aged well, and their American imitators have aged even worse.

R39, learn to use the [italic]italic[/italic] format. It's easy.

I think her idea that the 70s marked a golden age of cinema is wrong and many of those so-called "great" films of the 70s continue to get worse with age (case-in-point:Last Tango in Paris). I know many critics agree with her but many of those films look completely dated today. My personal opinion is that the late 40s through the mid or late 60s was the peak of film. Classic films from that period are so much easier to watch than the masturbatory ones that came later.

She coerced a gay man into sex to get pregnant. There is nothing about that I am okay with.

Per R18: Don't give me that "times were different" crap because right is right and wrong is wrong no matter what year is it. < Right and wrong have always been and will always be a moving target, defined by each culture and generation to meet the needs and conscience of those who live in those times. The only people who believe in an eternal unchanging 'TRUTH' are fundamentalists--and even then their truth merely reinforces their own bias and is used as a cudgel to beat those who don't agree with them.

Oh blow it out your ass, R47. The older I get, the more I realize I like what movies were, and by that I mean what they were before they degenerated into narcissistic schlock. American cinema is dead and Ms. Kael's fingerprints are all over its corpse.

R48, you can blame Star Wars for the death of cinema more than anything else. More than any other movie, it ushered in the blockbuster/merchandising craze.

The 1970s was the fool's gold age of cinema.

r40

No, the quote is accurate.

HOWEVER

The quote quickly turned into an urban legend that Kael had instead stated something like "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him."

R51, now I remember, that was the way the quote was spun to make it seem like liberals are out of touch. Regardless of which quote was used, it's a stereotype of those of us on the left that, unfortunately, has a strong basis in reality.

It still shows how out of touch she was with the rest of the country.

The quote was real, it just got paraphrased over the years.

Kael would be the perfect person to be a Bernie volunteer.

None of this changes the fact that we are still paying for her misjudgements. She and Joseph Campbell are the two most pernicious influences on American film in history.

I was baffled y your inclusion of Joseph Campbell, checked Wiki, "George Lucas was the first Hollywood filmmaker to credit Campbell's influence. Lucas stated, following the release of the first Star Wars film in 1977, that its story was shaped, in part, by ideas described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other works of Campbell's.

I enjoyed her writing, even when I disagreed with her.

No substance? She dissected the movie from every viewpoint, the acting, directing, cinematography, music. At worst, you wanted to throw the book against the wall. But at best, you simply wanted to watch the movie regardless of what she wrote. As Brando said about her, her passion for film seeped through every review.

And she was right about "prestigious" movies often being a crock of shit. Just look at most of the garbage that has gotten Oscar recognition over the last twenty years. Unwatchable. There can be value in the commercial and the junk, and she was really the only critic on that level that was saying something like that, while the others (Sarris, Simon to name a few) were too humorless and callow to ever let their hair down like that.

She HATED Natalie Wood.

[quote]None of this changes the fact that we are still paying for her misjudgements.

This is kind of dumb. She hated Star Wars, and yet Star Wars and its ilk have basically taken over the movie industry. I think she had very little impact. But her writing is fantastic and speaks for itself.

"She hated Star Wars"

I HATED Star Wars too

r60

who didn't?

I think the OP is an OVERRATED TROLL who starts multiple threads on people and subjects he knows nothing about.

What kind of person can't at least appreciate 2001 and find no enjoyment in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

FF R4. Racist trash.

Correction, R66: ILLITERATE racist trash.

[quote]The world is homophobe

Oh you all need to shove it you bitter cunts. She's dead. You're all OLD. Nobody cares. She was popular decades ago. You can't take that away from her. And she is of no importance now and was never more than a popular critic for middle-high-brows. She wasn't read in film studies, for example. Sheesh!

Au contraire, R68...

[quote]She HATED Natalie Wood.

Very good call. Possibly the worst (long employed) actress of all time. Natalie Wood couldn't deliver a line, never mind a hook...

Pauline's essay on Ginger and Fred is golden fun and a lot of her reviews are brazenly opinionated and way too tangential. She was insightful. That's what separates a critic from a historian. She was way before my time, but undeniably a unique voice. Her critiques and tone would fit well into Vulture or The Beast.

The Homophobe question kind of bugs me. She was of course, but not intentionally. Some of the greatest dames of all times loved their fags. Kael was more known for her idiosyncratic championing of non leading men AND women types in film. The 1970s seem to be the time for that change. I haven't much intelligent to say, but I read such negativity here about all film history, music and stage criticism that I wonder just what kind of juiceless fuck makes old fags happy? It was a different time. The portrayals are dark or mocking. Old gay men seem to hold on to that time of self hatred and turn it back on those they enjoyed quoting when they were young. That is kind of all of Datalounge. It's a tearing down of everything celebrated even 4 years before. (Hillary Clinton) Gay men must learn to admit that they have an overexcited gene and love to dismiss anyone who can't satisfy them forever. Ha.

Pauline was pretty cool. Her reviews are too much one way or the other, but not often dull. She loved the movies. I've read terrible things on DL about Roger Ebert too. And his reviews are quietly great, most of the time. He's more sincere than PK. Kael wasn't quiet. Don't start to disagree with loud voices too much old men. Now or in the past. Homophobe? Ok boomer.

Silly me

[quote]And she is of no importance now and was never more than a popular critic for middle-high-brows. She wasn't read in film studies, for example.

She's in the Library of America now, alongside people like Faulkner and Melville. I doubt she'd care much about whether she's read in film studies.

R70 I don't think it's old boomers who are trashing her. My suspicion is it's the young who have at best a superficial understanding of history and culture and believe that this moment and their opinions are all that matter.

Salon.com published an article in 2004 after she died entitled-

[quote] The gay attacks on Pauline Kael: How did America's leading film critic, who was fearlessly opposed to cant and dogma of all stripes, come to be seen as a homophobe?

It's long and does a point-counter point discussion of some of her homophobic (or alleged homophobic) commentaries.

One example:

[quote] And Kael was alert to real homophobia. A 1972 observation about blaxploitation films -- "These movies are often garishly anti-homosexual; homosexuality seems to stand for weakness and cowardice -- 'corruption'" -- still applies to the hip-hop scene. She denounced Ken Russell's gay-themed movies ("homo-erotic in style, and yet in dramatic content ... bizarrely anti-homosexual") as "flaming anti-faggotry."

[quote] And she was sensitive to subtler kinds of homophobia, as in the 1977 ballet picture "The Turning Point": "Would movie audiences care whether the male dancers were actually homosexual, as long as they moved with precision and refinement, and could soar when necessary? Maybe some still would; maybe there is a sound commercial instinct behind this picture's attempt to ingratiate itself by showing ballet as 'normal.' But ... it would be more honorable to take a chance on the audience."

You can read the rest at link if interested.

Thanks R74. Good content. I can't read everything of Pauline Kael. I'm busy bitch, but of course she was grossly everything. She had no philosophy and no real criteria. I'm sure she slagged gays and women and worshipped men a bit too much. All through film history. But when she loved a female performer, she fell in love with them. Ha. She couldn't have been more famous but I think she was ahead of her time. Would she bashed into oblivion now? Of course. But she would have a different sensibility now too. Good for her to use the word faggotry....good word.

I'm sorry R73, but I don't think the criticism here is coming from people my age (37) or younger. Kael's pieces are sometimes very long and other times mention none of the things we expect to hear about in a film review. DL has a strong contingent of old gays who are cranky about everything, including the civil rights movement and AIDS. They're eating themselves alive and tearing everyone up in the process. If you need to stan someone, (i do) then do it forcefully here or go to twitter with a good quote.

'Roger Ebert said in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades."

He was an idiot so who cares what he said. I never thought he was a particularly astute critic, or his sidekick Gene Siskel either. They said a lot of stupid things.

As for Kael, well, I never liked her. She had a weird way of looking at things. I never thought she was right most of the time. Robert Redford said she once invited him to get together with her and have a drink. He declined. And she spoke negatively about him ever after.

Excerpt from R74's link: The gay attacks on Kael are obviously painful to me, and not just because, as a gay friend of hers, I feel injured by assaults on her good name. To me they represent something far more destructive. They embody the same hopeless script that progressives have enacted again and again for the past century. Why does the left persist in exhausting itself by attacking its allies instead of its enemies? Why do deviations from orthodoxy provoke so much bitterness that the left winds up shifting its energy, its passion, away from the true threats? What was gained by creating a straw villainess out of Kael at a time when homosexuals had so many real antagonists who were virulent, indefatigable and gleefully out in the open?

It's always strange when my cousin gets quoted in the DL, R23. My cousin was gay, but he thought she was compelling enough to write a book about. Truthfully, I didn't know of her until the book was written and we got a copy.

And scene R77. Sounds beautiful. Like a Frank Capra speech for 2020. WE don't get it sometimes. Kael remains great and I suspect her old fans think so. She may not be selling too many new books. But her individualism and wild swings are worth taking. She was sometimes plain cruel, but that wasn't her most marked characteristic or her goal in writing about film. And anyone who can't see the value in Roger Ebert's reviews - has not read enough of them either.

It’s hard to respect someone who desperately forced a gay man into heterosexual sex.

And if she hated [italic]Star Wars[/italic], then maybe [italic]Star Wars[/italic] wasn’t all that bad after all. But there is still no reason its success should’ve come at the expense of more adult-centric filmmaking.

Those are great questions, r77. And similar questions could be asked about so many DL threads.

Her gay "friend" is a pathetic quisling and she was still a philistine of the highest order.

r81, it was inevitable. The film studios saw that big money was to be made with loud blockbuster type films that could be merchandized to death. Who needs auteurs when you can be rolling in money (that was their philosophy).

All this talk of MS Kael reminds me of another polarizing figure:Camille Paglia Quotes If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.

There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.

Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture

Pursuit and seduction are the essence of sexuality. It's part of the sizzle.

Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.

When anything goes, it's women who lose.

Woman is the dominant sex. Men have to do all sorts of stuff to prove that they are worthy of woman's attention.

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

Bullshit, R77.

She was a blowhard who took 10 words to say what could easily be said with five.

Kael was the only critic who counted. Made it an art form. Never more clear than the sad state of what passes for film criticism now.

I could always count on her to make me feel better when the whole world loved shit like "Field of Dreams" and I hated it. And she would champion much maligned actors like Nancy Allen too. The only one to give young Jessica Lange praise when she was a bit of a joke -- and then Kael was proven right. As she often was.

She was proven wrong more often than not, R88.

On Meryl Streep:

“Something about her puzzles me: after I’ve seen her in a movie, I can’t visualize her from the neck down. . . . Her movie heroines don’t seem to be full characters, and there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her. It could be that in her zeal to be an honest actress she allows nothing to escape her conception of a performance.”

Please, she wasn't THAT bad. But she does lend her undeniable talents to second-rate work hoping she can elevate it just by being there.

Who?

R92 = Judith Crist's ghost, subtly shading her from Heaven

I would say that's a good description of the younger Streep. She's much better now.

Yet she went from such high-falutin' fare to [italic]The French Lieutenant's Woman[/italic] and [italic]Sophie's Choice[/italic] to crap like [italic]Mamma Mia 2[/italic] and a Disney sequel too embarrassing to mention.

Streep on Kael:

“You know what I think?” she asked in 2008. “That Pauline was a poor Jewish girl at Berkeley with all these rich Pasadena WASPs with long blonde hair, and their heartlessness got to her; then, years later, she saw me.”

Oh, please. I'm Jewish and even I'm not buying that sexist Freudian crap.

"Streep can't take a bite of food without acting out Eating." - Kael

"He's a great actor. He bores me blind." - Kael on... guess who

Se could be economic with her words when she wanted to be.

"Two hours of nails on a blackboard." - Kael's entire review on DL favorite chick flick

"Meryl can't be here tonight, as she has the flu." "But I hear she's wonderful in it."

Amy Poehler

R98, is she speaking of DDL?

Good guess but she liked DDL, certainly in his early work. No, "he's a great actor, he bores me blind" (a comment I "borrow" all the time) is in regards to... Robert Duvall.

I’m sure she really hated Streep after that comment, r96...

OP is Matt Anscher.

R96 well I think she was dead by the time Streep said it so I doubt she got the chance.

I agree about Duvall, btw.

I'm not really trying to be mean about anyone but who IS Matt? I think he's the Jessica Lange lover, but what other obsessions does he have? Is he the Tori Amos and Joan Jett troll too? The Jussie Smollett fanatic? Some trolls are amusing and some are better to keep away from. I am not a fan of racists and anti semites. I hear the name Matt often, but I'm not sure how much content he supplies to Datalounge. I'm not interested in hurting anyone, but there are a few obsessives who make me unnecessarily pissed off and I would like to know which "subjects" to avoid. Thanks.

She wrote of Kevin Coster in her review of Dances with Wolves, “He has feathers in his head.”

And his Indian name should be "Plays with Camera".

"There are many privileges to beauty but is ()'s bad acting one of them? She emits peals of phony laughter and bares her teeth when she is meant to be charming." (I paraphrase a bit).

Guess whom she was talking about.

R109, Meryl?

Sean Young

Good guess but nothing so glamorous... Sean Young.

Here's another I use all the time: "(This movie) is ___ ____ banging the same note on the piano for two hours and twenty minutes." Clue: He won an Oscar for sad piano banging (and I agree with Kael on this one).

R112, Dudley Moore?

R112 rain man.

"I keep waiting for her to show the charm she had in (a well known TV movie) but to no avail. Here, she might as well be in the high school play." Which Scorsese actress?

"____ is a cute kid and he sells magazines but, here, he might as well be on the tennis team." - a DL favorite to bash

"(Movie title), where is thy sting?" - a DL favorite

R109, it has to be Julia Roberts....

Famously.... "(She) smirks like she's just said something very clever... a big goosey drag queen." - an actress she hated but came around to before the end

(after famous naked male ass shot): "Not the kind of thing a woman would get into. Are we supposed to get turned on FOR her?"

Pauline got a LOT of shit for this review in general since the director was a sacred cow (and closet case).

R112 Adrian Brody for his Oscar winning performance. R117 Richard Gere

Rosanna Arquette is the Scorsese actress.

117=Rich & Famous

R119 is clearly a fellow Kaelette.

"If it's her only voice, she had better be careful how she is cast." - an actress she loved, then cooled on (like everyone else)

R120, Shelley Duvall?

I loved the opening too: "Rich and Famous" stars those two unoccupied bodies, Candice Bergen and Jackie Bisset."

I wish she was still around. You just know she would've hated Brie in "Room".

No she loved Shelley, though she said she wasn't really an actress.

No, the voice quote also included a reference to her "metallic whine". An obvious Best Actress nominee who is probably smarting a bit since her ex is up this year.

SHe also had certain girl crushes (most notably DEbra Winger) that quickly became tiresome review after review.

Melanie Griffith

Very clever, R141. Matt Anscher (sp?) is the Jessica Lange hater, Faye Dunaway stalker.

He also “gets triggered” by Mary Poppins, of all things.

The Jessica Lange fan is prone to posting about Lange, Bernie Sanders, Tori Amos, Kate Bush, David Wojnarowicz, and spirituality.

Matt Anscher is like Mary Worth. We've mentioned his name twice already. One more time and he might just appear

Kael was great at delivering cutting one-liners and I agree with her more often than I don’t. She also anticipated the modern era when American cinema would be franchise (and money) driven and dominated by movies for kids.

And she was spot on re: Streep; so transparent it’s like you can actually see her thinking through every action in a given performance.

Also, Kael was PERFECTION. My favorite film critic, even though I don’t agree with all of her reviews.

She was totally off about Ordinary People and especially MTM’s brilliant, should’ve-won-the-Oscar work.

Still, I love me some feisty P.K.

She did nothing to stop it, R129. The movies she championed were just as juvenile for different reasons.

We've discussed Streep's comment on Kael on DL before. It was a more telling comment about Streep. I suspect she idolized Kael as a critic and then for her to continue to dismiss her performances as stagey and artificial had to be disheartening. Kael's observation about her being unable to imagine her from the neck down had to do with the thought that Streep put into her performances. Kael said that she would put so much attention into various parts of her performances, like the accent, the hair (which coincided with Streep's comment) that the rest of her faded away. She also said that she felt film acting was about freedom in front of the camera, the ability to simply be the character, not to project. Because you always saw the preparation that Streep went to in order to play the part, she could never have that freedom. She also said she got sick of her being all weepy in every movie. Whether you agree or not, that is very clear thinking as to why she thought she was a fine actress but wasn't one of her favorites.

Kael championed so many WASPs. She adored Blythe Danner and Davis and Hepburn. For Streep to go there means she didn't do her research this time.

It doesn't matter what the record books say, Streep will not be remembered as one of the all time great actresses. The performances AND the actress have to move you or delight you for that to happen. Streep is a string of successful impersonations but her best role is the one she's crafted for her public self. She's so witty and self effacing and grand and mumbled asides. She must be a most ordinary personality in real life. When Meryl is most herself, she is only adequate. Hope Springs. Every other performance of hers is pitched one way or another. She's got a set of balls. But she is the least natural "great" actress of all time. I applaud her for her bravery to let Jimmy Fallon kiss her ass. She's dedicated and hardworking and wants to be great. Three times she was. A few other times amusing. Clever.

One last thing - where do people get the idea that Meryl is different in every role - that she channels another human entity when immersing herself in a role? Her mannerisms and characteristics are very recognizable. Her repertoire of emotion is on par with Diane Keaton. Meryl puts more hats on her hat, as Mike Nichols once told her. "You're wearing a hat on your hat."

I love Streep but her analysis of Kael’s supposed insecurities is a bit pretentious and unaware.

Not a good moment.

R132. Mary!

A couple of paragraphs from Renata Adler's famous hatchet job on Pauline:

Now, "When the Lights Go Down," a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless. It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture. Over the years, that is, Ms. Kael's quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse. To the spectacle of the staff critic as celebrity in frenzy, about to "do" something "to" a text, Ms. Kael has added an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.

She has, in principle, four things she likes: frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail; sex scenes, so long as they have an ingredient of cruelty and involve partners who know each other either casually or under perverse circumstances; and fantasies of invasion by, or subjugation of or by, apes, pods, teens, bodysnatchers, and extraterrestrials. Whether or not one shares these predilections—and whether they are in fact more than four, or only one—they do not really lend themselves to critical discussion. It turns out, however, that Ms. Kael does think of them as critical positions, and regards it as an act of courage, of moral courage, to subscribe to them. The reason one cannot simply dismiss them as de gustibus, or even as harmless aberration, is that they have become inseparable from the repertory of devices of which Ms. Kael's writing now, almost wall to wall, consists.

Renata Adler is one of those rich-I-don't-need-to-work white women who think everyone is interested in their navel gazing. We're not.

Adler was addicted to Another World when Mac was being poisoned by Christine Jones. She even wrote about it.

Two of the most delicious hatchet jobs ever written are the one Adler wrote on Kael and the one Barbara Grizzutti Harrison wrote on Joan Didion.

Mary McCarthy's one line demolition of Lillian Hellman gets an Honorable Mention.

Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”

That Adler takedown was nuts. And so long. I think I tried to read it once.

[quote]I'm not really trying to be mean about anyone but who IS Matt? I think he's the Jessica Lange lover, but what other obsessions does he have? Is he the Tori Amos and Joan Jett troll too? The Jussie Smollett fanatic? Some trolls are amusing and some are better to keep away from. I am not a fan of racists and anti semites. I hear the name Matt often, but I'm not sure how much content he supplies to Datalounge. I'm not interested in hurting anyone, but there are a few obsessives who make me unnecessarily pissed off and I would like to know which "subjects" to avoid. Thanks.

r106- You're "not interested in hurting anyone" yet have the audacity to make the most heartless, cruel comments on Joan Jett- calling her "talentless", "bald", "a junkie", etc?! Um, okay, LOL.

Drop the innocent act. You're the troll, and anyone who reads your stupid comments knows it!

Kael was flawed, spirited and unapologetically brilliant.