The most stinging critiques ever written or uttered

Damn. She nailed it.

Teehee!

Well as we know, Pauline was wrong about Streep, who eclipsed her in fame. Film critics are basically lame.

R3 That's what critics do though.

Ebert admitted he couldn’t even make it all the way through the film in his 1980 review: “Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length … Caligula is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn.”

Movie stars SHOULD eclipse their critics in fame, at the very least. That's a pretty low bar.

But the fact that we're quoting Kael on Streep almost 40 years later should tell you something about the accuracy of her assessment.

My favorite has always been by ascribed to Dorothy Parker...

Miss Hepburn ran the whole gamut of emotions—from A to B.

Yes, I see the error, so save the Oh Dears.

Ben Brantley (NYT) on the Bway musical version of HIGH FIDELITY:

"A new musical is said to have opened last night on Broadway. I mean, I saw it. Or I think I did. It's called, uh, wait a minute, it'll come to me. Got it! "High Fidelity." And if I close my eyes and concentrate really hard, I just might be able to describe a show that erases itself from your memory even as you watch it."

Too much yodeling. (An Amazon reviewer of the recording of FLOYD COLLINS. For some reason it makes me laugh.)

Gary Indiana on Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show:

“He has always been there in his network time slot, embalmed in a dense magma of reassuring mediocrity, mugging behind his desk as if to guarantee the faceless millions that they, too, can repeat the same absurd gestures day after day, year after year, without an unbearable amount of suffering.”

Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman on The Dick Cavett Show: "...every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

Hellman sued for over two million dollars for defamation. The suit plodded through the courts for several years but Hellman's estate dropped it when Hellman died.

Peter Marks, The Washington Post:

Experiencing the stultifying “Taboo,” you feel as if you could be standing on a shaky pier on the edge of theaterland, waving the SS Broadway Musical goodbye.

John Simon, who always took cheap shots at actresses whose looks he didn't like, wrote the infamous review in which he claimed that "Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses."

Rigg contributed that review to her compilation of the worst notices actors and actresses received, called "No Turn Unstoned".

R14, ouch!

This guy's scathing review of Guy Fieri's Times Square eatery was epic.

[quote] Well as we know, Pauline was wrong about Streep, who eclipsed her in fame. Film critics are basically lame.

Honey, she wasn't trying to be more famous than Meryl Streep.

Dataloungers always assume everyone else is a jealous competitive bitch because THEY are.

People are only quoting Pauline because she was a cunt.

Pauline was fulla shit most of the time, but she could be funny. Re La Lana: "She's not Madame X, she's Brand X."

The notoriously cunty Rex Reed spared little love for Melissa McCarthy:

“Melissa McCarthy is a gimmick comedian who has devoted her short career to being obese and obnoxious with equal success,” Reed wrote. “Poor Jason Bateman. How did an actor so charming, talented, attractive and versatile get stuck in so much dreck?”

^^An entire thread could be made from Rex Reed quotes.

Who was cuntier? Rexy Reed or John Simon?

"Phyllis Newman will have to do as Stella."

From Roger Ebert’s review of “Freddie Got Fingered”: This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

Roger Ebert had so much gall, considering BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS.

R22 Possibly Rex Reed. I don't recall the film/review, but I remember some movie from the 80s where Rex wrote an incredibly nasty, scathing insult about Molly Ringwald. And she wasn't in the movie!

Michael Feingold on Miss Saigon:

[quote] Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get Miss Saigon, which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over. After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished… all the members of the League of New York Theaters must be lined up and shot; the New York Times must be firebombed into nothingness and its entire editorial staff (most of whom are composed wholly of gravel and pitch anyway) fed into a stonecrusher and used to repave the West Side Highway; while anyone found to have voluntarily purchased a $100 ticket to Miss Saigon must be sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor and have his or her children cooked and distributed as food supplies to famine areas in the Third World. The authors, one hopes, will have the grace to commit ritual suicide…while Cameron Mackintosh and his production staff should be slowly beaten to death with blunt instruments… In answer to your next question, no, I didn’t like Miss Saigon.

But how did he *really* feel, r27?

[quote]"Cage" should be his home, not his name.

If someone wrote a review like the Feingold one these days he or she would get canceled immediately for daring to attack a show in which at least one of the leads is not white.

You shut your dirty whore mouth about Beyond The Valley of The Dolls!!!

Kael was a virulent and brazen homophobe.

Her thoughts are meaningless.

Renata Adler’ as infamous 1980 takedown of Pauline Kael’s “When the Lights Go Down,” including her dismissal of the book as:

[QUOTE]"jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless",

The Rolling Stone review of the first Led Zeppelin album. The only good thing they had to say was that Jimmy Page was a talented guitarist.

A review of sorts: when she was informed that Calvin Coolidge had died, Dorothy Parker was alleged to have quipped "How could they tell?"

People Magazine's review of Barbra Streisand's The Mirror has Two Faces: "and the theater has many exits."

Music critic Greil Marcus on Michael Jackson's Invincible: "He lives...as in They Live. Doesn't anyone remember this guy sleeps with children!?". I couldn't agree more.

Kael's remark about Streep was relatively early in the latter's career, and I can see what Kael meant. But Streep improved and became more relaxed as an actress.

Another Kael quote about Glenda Jackson, from the mid-70s: "She spits out lines like venom. She's as easy to imitate as Bette Davis." At that point in Jackson's career that was an accurate assessment.

Robert Christgau's review of Ashanti's debut: "shallow orgasms aren't bad orgasms, but she could probably do better with her own hand ."

The curtain rose at 8 sharp and came down at 9:45 dull.

I laughed when Kael reviewed Popeye and wrote something like, " Shelley Duvall (as Olive Oyl) seems woefully miscast in the role she was born to play."

R38, has Streep improved over time? I think that’s debatable. Her role selection has certainly declined.

"A vacuum with nipples."

—Otto Preminger on Marilyn Monroe

"It isn't writing at all—it's typing."

"She looks like a truck driver in drag."

Richard Burton on Lucille Ball:

“She is a monster of staggering charmlessness and monumental lack of humour …. I am coldly sarcastic with her to the point of outright contempt but she hears only what she wants to hear ….

"She is a tired old woman and lives entirely on that weekly show which she has been doing and successfully doing for 19 years. Nineteen solid years of double-takes and pratfalls and desperate upstaging and cutting out other people’s laughs if she can, nervously watching the ‘ratings’ as she does so …

"I loathe her today but now I also pity her. I make a point of never seeing her again …. Milady Ball can thank her lucky stars that I am not drinking. There is a chance that if I had I might have killed her."

“So young and already so unknown.”

"I don't think Jackie has the vaguest idea [of] the extent of Lee's obsession with Jackie . . . Lee used to say that she [Lee] was the one who was good looking, who had the taste, who was chic, who could run a home, who was clever, who read books, but it was always Jackie who got all the publicity. And of course, there was some truth to that."

Tom Shales' annual reviews of Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas specials aren't as well-remembered as they should be. Let's fix that.

"Kathie Lee Gifford sings songs like she's mad at them. What did they ever do to her? Maybe she was frightened by a song as a child. And by Christmas, too, because each year on television she wreaks a bit more revenge."

"As readers of tabloid tattlers know, Kathie Lee has had a difficult year. And one can sympathize. Her husband, Frank, the dull sportscaster, was videotaped committing extramarital hanky-panky. You'd think Kathie Lee would be intent on getting back at her husband rather than taking it out on all of us."

"At least she shows more sparkle on the special than her dreadful guests. First up is Kenny Rogers, looking as though he were miffed at being awakened from a nap in his dressing room."

"After Smith comes another singer, CeCe Winans, whom Kathie Lee hails as "a great mom" who's "raising a beautiful family." That's nice because as a singer Winans likes to punish her material even more mercilessly than Kathie Lee does. She drags "O Holy Night" on for so long it becomes "O Holy Night and Well Into the Next Morning."

When Godspell returned to London for a limited engagement after a UK tour one critic wagged, "If you missed it when it was here before, now is your golden opportunity! You can miss it again."

"Why do you suppose Irish Catholics are all such social climbers? Is it because their mothers were all maids? . . . Oh, I don't mean YOU!"

"I'd call her a cunt, but she lacks both the depth and the charm."

William Styron should have been a Datalounger.

R3 There is a 2019 feature length documentary "What She Said" about Pauline Kael which is now available on DVD and Amazon Prime as well as a biography about her titled "A Life in the Dark" There are about a dozen titles available on Amazon or ebay that are collections of her reviews: Reeling, I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss, Kiss Bang,Bang...She was one of the most influential film critics ever and her review of Bonnie and Clyde helped get the film re-released after it did fair BO and was not generally well-received. There was a period of time in the 70s when her revews were thought to be able to make or break a film. And for someone who was not a movie star but a critic her fame has lasted for over half a century.

In the 1930s, when playwright Clifford Odets premiered another drama about social injusticises and the evils of capitalism, critic George S. Kaufman's review headline read "ODETS, WHERE IS THY STING?".

We forget him because he was a straight man, but oooooh what a bitch he could be!

Kael was acerbic, but her zingers were usually highly considered. Even when I disagree with her (which is increasingly often in retrospect) I can see where she's coming from.

John Simon was a truly nasty piece of work, but to his credit he later apologized for his comments about Diana Rigg and said he had misspoken.

Rex Reed is a cheap hack. His insults are boring and tacky.

Renata Adler is talented, but a back-stabber.

Rex Reed reviewed the movie of HAIR:

Let's give it a permanent wave... goodbye!

Bosley Crowther - Joan Crawford - I’ll paraphrase it, I can’t remember the exact words.

Whatever this woman had, she still hasn’t got it. The lady, as usual is a sexless as the lions on the New York Library steps, and is as romantically forbidden as an unwrapped package of razor blades...

Someone else made the astute comment about Renata Adler that the only thing she is remembered for is her bad review of Pauline Kael's book. She used to share the reviewing duties at the New Yorker with Pauline but people only quoted Kael.

Kael was very firm in her belief that acting on camera is about freedom, the concept of simply being, not projecting. That's why she was so critical of Streep. The attention to detail did not allow her to come alive, The idea of not being able to visualize her beneath the shoulders was because she said she puts so much attention into one part of her physical presence that the others simply melt away. At that time, Streep was heavy into her hair phase. Whether or not you agree with her take, that was her opinion and she wrote about it honestly, unlike Simon who was bitchy for the sake of being bitchy. Kael was about naturalism and felt Streep was too stagey.

BTW, the Rigg quote is inaccurate. It was "As Heloise, Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with inadequate flying buttresses and suggests neither intense womanliness nor outstanding intellect". That first observation is actually pretty funny writing but it also was relevant because Rigg was appearing nude in the show.

I can't remember which of Candice Bergen's films prompted this assessment of her from Kael: "She can't be said to act."

R53, great post! Not to mention that some of America's most prominent filmmakers cite her as a huge influence: Paul Schrader, Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, James Toback and many others.

My favorite stinging critique was Kael's take on Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: "Rain Man is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes."

[quote]Kael was a virulent and brazen homophobe.

That, she was. Despite lauding Cabaret.

R32 Kael might have been a prim old lady isolated in the Berkshires but the myth that she was a raving homophobe must be put to rest. What did she say that was homophobic? The harmless joke about lesbian sex in her review of the Children's Hour? That 'Rich and Famous' was a campy mess because Jacqueline Bissett and Candy Bergen came across as gay male fantasies of women rather than actual women? That "Victor/Victoria" was, in fact, homophobic and misogynistic? Or that "The Turning Point" tried laughably hard to scrub out any whiff of homosexuality from the ballet world?

Another choice Kael take, on Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July: "Cruise has the right All-American-boy look for the role here, but you wait for something to emerge, and realize the look goes all the way through. He has a little-boy voice and no depth of emotion....Cruise does have a manic streak, and Stone uses it for hysteria. (He might be a tennis pro falling to his knees and throwing his fists up in the air.)"

"...and that unisex thing is a no sex thing. Believe me, he's about as sexy as a pissing toad." Truman Capote, after obvserving Mick Jagger's Texas performances 24 and 25 June, 1972.

Kael made a lot of fag jokes in the late 60s and early 70s; but to be fair: at that time that was considered incredibly hip behavior from Kael's sort of crowd, and you'll find that in all kinds of writings from the period from literary East Coast types. Kael later apologized for using that word so much at that time, and it's undeniable she had an enormous number of gay male friends throughout and even before her career.

[Quote] Dataloungers always assume everyone else is a jealous competitive bitch because THEY are.

Oh I disagree. Bitches, yes, but dataloungers are not competitive because they are low achievers.

R64, god bless Truman Capote. Mick Jagger has always been as forced as Miley Cyrus when it comes to "sexiness".

per Wikipedia:

Accusations of homophobia

In his preface to a 1983 interview with Kael for the gay magazine Mandate, Sam Staggs wrote that "she has always carried on a love/hate affair with her gay legions. ... like the bitchiest queen in gay mythology, she has a sharp remark about everything".[63] In the early 1980s, however, and largely in response to her review of the 1981 drama Rich and Famous, Kael faced notable accusations of homophobia. First remarked upon by Stuart Byron in The Village Voice, according to gay writer Craig Seligman the accusations eventually "took on a life of their own and did real damage to her reputation".[64]

In her review, Kael called the straight-themed Rich and Famous "more like a homosexual fantasy," saying that one female character's "affairs, with their masochistic overtones, are creepy, because they don't seem like what a woman would get into".[65] Byron, who "hit the ceiling" after reading the review, was joined by The Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo, who argued that Kael equated promiscuity with homosexuality, "as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous."[65]

In response to her review of Rich and Famous, several critics reappraised Kael's earlier reviews of gay-themed films, including a wisecrack Kael made about the gay-themed The Children's Hour: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy—that there isn't much they can do."[66] Similarly, her criticism of the 1961 British film Victim was that the film sought to treat gay people "with sympathy and respect—like Negroes and Jews." Craig Seligman has defended Kael, saying that these remarks showed "enough ease with the topic to be able to crack jokes—in a dark period when other reviewers. ... 'felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread.'"[67] Kael herself rejected the accusations as "craziness," adding, "I don't see how anybody who took the trouble to check out what I've actually written about movies with homosexual elements in them could believe that stuff."[68]

Kael was married to a gay man, James Broughton, and had a daughter with him.

So... issues.

Roger Ebert reviewing Elvis Presley in Easy Come, Easy Go:

“He sings a lot, but I won’t go into that. What I will say, however, is that after two dozen movies he should have learned to talk by now”.

I wish I could remember which actress Libby Gelman-Waxner was talking about when she said "It's like she was put on Earth to make Ali MacGraw feel better."

Libby Gelman Waxner was Paul Rudnick.

We know.

Years ago, I assistant directed an original play. I thought it was quite good. The Los Angeles Times disabused me of this notion with a scathing review.

Here it is. Names redacted to protect the innocent:.

Los Angeles Times - Los Angeles, Calif. Author: F. KATHLEEN FOLEY Date: Dec 10 Start Page: 39 Section: Calendar; PART- F; Entertainment Desk Document Types: Theater Review Text Word Count: 248

If, in defiance of all taste and common sense, you insist upon seeing REDACTED at the Lost Studio, you may have to dip into your Y2K stash of Prozac a little early. REDACTED, who also directed this protracted purgatory of a play, obviously subscribes to the assault-and-battery school of play writing, in which craft, motivation and context are eviscerated by shock value.

Scenes of nonlinear degeneracy are thrown together with little regard for form. The play lasts almost three hours, but the barrage of extraneous unpleasantness proves wearying after the first five minutes. The staging is sloppy, the lighting self-consciously murky. From what little we can derive about the plot, we surmise that these characters are amoral pleasure-seekers intent on violating moral taboos and pushing the limits of human sensation to grisly new levels. But even that's an iffy guess.

Perhaps REDACTED intended his "dramedy" as a sendup of the darker- than-dark genre so prevalent in current theater. But it's all relentlessly pretentious, sustained at a pitch of hormonal excess. REDACTED bludgeons home the message that people are violent and vile, predators and victims trapped in an unending cycle of moral depravity. But it is the play that seems unending--and the hapless actors, a few of them genuinely talented, who are the real victims here. * * "REDACTED," Ends Feb. 5. $15. (323) 769-5809. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Burton was a drunk who pissed his career away

[Quote] We know.

Sorry. I took you for an insufferable ignoramus.

Well you're only half right! Who's laughing now?

It was Candice Bergen, R71

Judith Crist on Tippi Hedren:

Miss Hedren, described in studio literature as "classically beautiful . . . a regally poised [sic] blond with wide-set green eyes," made her debut in the director's [italic]The Birds[/italic], but in his new film, [italic]Marnie[/italic], the studio fact sheet continues, "she inherited one of the most challenging roles in recent times. The actress, who had no dramatic training prior to her discovery, approached the extremely difficult assignment with understandable concern. Hitchcock allayed her qualms when he pointed out that even the most complex role is played but one scene at a time - and that no single sequence lay beyond her talents." We will avoid the irreverent insinuation that similarly a bright seven-year old piano student could cope with Ives's [italic]Concord Sonata[/italic] by playing one note at a time. The point is, of course, beyond the director's paternalistic reassurance of his star, that the creative element in films is only partially provided by the performer. In the case of [italic]Marnie[/italic], neither the director nor the star provides even a fair share, and we are once again left with a latter-day Trilby emoting as directed from scene to scene.

R3 has the critical depth of a piss puddle.

Leigh Hunt's description of Lord Byron's face is one of the cattiest, bitchiest, and funniest things I ever read.

I believe it was Rex Reed who, after sitting through the 8+ hour staging of Nicholas Nickleby, said, 'it was like flying to India in coach'.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison on Joan Didion:

"When I am asked why I do not find Joan Didion appealing, I am tempted to answer -- not entirely facetiously -- that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo; I am disinclined to find endearing a chronicler of the 1960s who is beset by migraines that can be triggered by her decorator's having pleated instead of gathered her new dining room curtains."

OP, that Kael quote is yet another of countless examples that, although Kael was extremely talented as a writer in the specific terms of the way she actually put words together, she had lousy taste when it came to assessing the quality of a movie overall, the performances in it, etc. Embarrassingly so.

[quote]I believe it was Rex Reed who, after sitting through the 8+ hour staging of Nicholas Nickleby, said, 'it was like flying to India in coach'.

Ditto, but without Kael's talent as a writer.

Bernard Shaw on golf:

"A nice long walk spoiled."

from a review of A Walk with Love and Death

...there is a perfectly blank, supremely inept performance in the feminine lead by Huston's daughter, Anjelica, who has the face of an exhausted gnu, the voice of an unstrung tennis racket, and a figure of no describable shape. As for Asaf Dayan, the son of General Moshe Dayan, in the male lead, I suspect that his father could not only act, speak, and think, but even see better.

John Simon October, 1969

PS for R85 General Moshe Dayan lost his left eye in combat and always wore a patch over it as he could not be fitted with a glass eye.

I don't think anyone can better this:

H. G. Wells once compared the typical James novel to “a church lit but with no congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there is a dead kitten, an egg shell, a piece of string.”

When Wells first visited the U.S. he surveyed the New York skyline as his ship steamed into the harbor and said "What a magnificent ruin it will make."

Only old civilizations know ruin.

I've known a few people who ruined quite early.

R88, that was beyond DULL. And if you read above, a lot of people have topped that...

R88, that was brilliant.

G.K. Chesterton on Times Square and Broadway lit up at night:

"What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read”

I've always liked this play review quote from George Jean Nathan:

Act 2 was apparently staged during intermission.

"The play started at 7 PM. When I checked my watch at 8:30 it was 7:20."

Two thumbs up for you, R78.

Pauline Kael on "Funny Lady" and Streisand.

[quote] The moviemakers weren't just going to make a sequel to FUNNY GIRL-they were going to kill us. (And they wanted to outdo CABARET, besides.) Again as Fanny Brice, Barbra Streisand is no longer human; she's like a bitchy female impersonator imitating Barbra Streisand.

I think Streisand called up Kael and told her she agreed with the review.

[quote]Who was cuntier? Rexy Reed or John Simon?

I present John Simon:

Quite aside from her persona, however, I find Miss Streisand's looks repellent. Perhaps this is my limitation, but I cannot accept a romantic heroine who is both knock-kneed and ankleless (maybe one of those things, but not both!), short-waisted and shapeless, scrag-toothed and with a horse face centering on a nose that looks like Brancusi's Rooster cast in liverwurst. I believe in beauty or in a performer's ability to make himself or herself attractive in one way or another even when lacking outstanding physical endowments. Think, for example, of those English leading ladies like Celia Johnson, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Rita Tushingham, and a host of others - plain women who, through make-up, acting ability, or, most likely, a spiritual intensity that suffuses their faces, make themselves lovely. Streisand remains arrogantly, exultantly ugly.

Michael Musto's one-word review of Babs Streisand's YENTL: "Mentl"

"Sting" premiered a "musical" that didn't last very long on Broadway, THE LAST SHIP, back around 2013. Sometime around the same time, a single line appeared on the corner of a page in THE NEW YORKER, as a kind of 'cartoon' with no picture. It said only: "Oh Sting, where is thy death?"

R6 - that doesn't mean the comment was right - it's just that it was an amazing insult. Big difference.

On Meryl Streep - She looks like a horse (or was it chicken?)

Younger Meryl always looked more like a bird than anything else. Not necessarily a good thing.

Chicken face was once a fairly common description of Streep at one time. I always thought Capote started it, at least publicly.

Kael liked Streep and had hopes for her as an actress when Streep first came on the scene.

Kael on "The Deerhunter":

[quote] The only woman we see in Clairton who could attract a man of substance for more than a quick fling is Meryl Streep’s Linda, who works in the supermarket; Streep has the clear-eyed blond handsomeness of a Valkyrie — the slight extra length of her nose gives her face a distinction that takes her out of the pretty class into real beauty. She doesn’t do anything standard; everything seems fresh. But her role is to be the supportive woman, who suffers and endures, and it’s a testament to Meryl Streep’s heroic resources as a mime that she makes herself felt — she has practically no lines.

From a Life Magazine article on Carol Channing:

She looks like an overgrown kewpie. She sings like a moon-mad hillbilly. Her dancing is crazily comic. And behind her saucer eyes is a kind of gentle sweetness that pleads for affection.

Kael's review of Last Tango in Paris is arguably considered to be the most famous film review in history. It was such a huge deal at the time that the studio printed her entire review over two pages of newspaper ad to help promote the film.

Time has dimmed her influence, but she was HUGE in the 70's. Filmakers and actors constantly courted her for opinions on their projects. Coppola screened a rough cut of Apocalypse now for her, and claims that she panned the movie because he didn't take out a scene that she thought should be cut. Streisand showed her Prince of Tides to get her opinion before releasing it.

I like Henry James. His The Ambassadors was such an amazing, subtle, beautiful book--and it was utterly true to the gulf between American and European sensibilities. But I heard this insult from an English grad student and thought it was brilliant in a really cruel way.

Actually, the reason I didn't do English grad school was a bunch of snobs saying things like, "Hemingway was not that good," and acting superior to the artists they could only study, not emulate.

Just wanted to say that.

The Ambassadors is superior to all of H.G. Wells’ output. Strether is a great creation.

R110 , I would argue that The Portrait of a Lady is also superior to all of H.G. Wells' literary output.

Pauline on The Goddess. Paddy Chayefsky's famous ear for dialogue is in full cauliflower.

I can't say if Henry James is any good as I've never been able to finish any of his books. Same goes for Faulkner.

The Bostonians made a good solid film. Not great cinema but in a literary adaptation way.

Maybe this is the only way we can appreciate James. If so, why did it need to be written as a book? At least with bad writers like Stephen King they entertained readers before being made into superior art in another form.

Donald Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” Fran Lebowitz on DJT.

Fran is so spot on.

R111. I agree. I get that James is not everyone’s taste, but I’ve never really gotten the “he’s so difficult”—no, he’s wordy, but if you take the time there is nothing I find obscure, even in the three late novels (Ambassadors, Wings of the Dive, Golden Bowl). He may bore some readers, test their patience. Portrait is his most accessible full-length novel, with great characters and a dramatically interesting plot.

R116 wordy? Boring? Test patience? Doesn't sound like James is a great writer to me.

R60 I believe the film may have been T.R. Baskin (1971) I remember she said T.R. is not a character and Bergen is not an actress and it was the worst starring performance she had ever seen and that in an acting contest between Bergen and Ali McGraw, McGraw would win.

I always consider Kael's comments on films of a certain age when I'm looking critically at them. She always - always - has her finger pointing at things that matter, and there is a form of integrated aesthetics behind her observations and assertions, although it is incomplete and something of the autodidact.

I believe she loved movies and responded emotionally to them, and tried to work her emotions into her text. The narrative often also contained her biases, peeves, and sudden moods. But I almost never completely disagree with her on what is and is not a good movie, and what performances are true.

She still is attacked because of her manner and the nastiness of her cult, and because she was a woman who often didn't give a fuck, and because there were elements of self-service there that were spotlit because, yes, she was a woman.

Compared to the current crap in the NYT, New Yorker and other former arbiters of fitness in popular arts, though, she compares pretty well.

Of course H.G. Wells would not understand the symbols on Henry's altar. They lived in two different worlds.

After an early friendliness, James and Wells broke it off, as he found that Wells had “so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so little living.”

The year before James died, Wells went off on him in surprisingly harsh ways in a publication. James responded with a polite nod and Wells went after him again. James then pointedly eviscerated Wells's aesthetic (or lack of it) in what should be the end of the subject.

One may not like Henry James or his novels. But apart from fodder for movie sequels, or whatever replaces film, for the next thousand years, it's James who will be read, not Wells.

Wasn’t M’s character in BLL based on Kael?

My take is that Pauline loved movies, was at times a great writer, but her own narcissism and personal opinions got in the way much too frequently. Too often her reviews are love letters to herself. She also was very controlling and literally pushed other critics to follow her opinions. And some of those opinions, like loving Las Tango, are full of shit and don’t hold up.

Re Pauline in the 70s R108 and how influential she was, my brother knew people back then who knew La Kael, and if he told me this once, he told me ten times. I'm not gonna say what he said here, but I'll say this: why do you think she gave such a "glowing" review of Heaven Can Wait? Think about it.

Not surprised. It was weird when Pauline went to Hollywood to work with Beatty. She was such a narcissistic weirdo that she actually thought she was a filmmaker and could be a major player in Hollywood. That blew up in her face and she was either fired or quit (or both).

“The Three Saddest Words in the English Language,” said Gore Vidal, “Are ‘Joyce Carol Oates'”

I used to read a music mag when I was a kid. Their review of Eartha Kitt's "Where is my Man" (1983) was three words:

[quote] Silly old cow

Pithy but accurate.

R123 somebody or somebody's brother is confused. Kael didn't like Heaven Can Wait and said she preferred Animal House. "It (HCW) wasn't bad. Why then does it offend me when I think about it?" I think somebody means Shampoo another film starring Beatty and directed by Hal Ashby that she raved about.

R115 totally true but she’s hardly the first person who said it or thought it. I think anyone with a brain realizes that.

R125, I'm shocked that you're the first person who mentioned Gore Vidal in this thread. Along with Kael, he was hysterically brutal with his criticism. My favorite was of his contemporary John Updike in that infamous TLS review:

[quote] Years ago, in unkind mood, Norman Mailer referred to Updike’s writing as the sort of prose that those who know nothing about writing think good. Today, theory, written preferably in near-English academese, absorbs the specialist, and prose style is irrelevant. Even so, what is one to make of this sentence: “The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness . . . to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlike he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe”? Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective? "

Ebert seems to have been a decent sort but it’s hard to muster much respect for his critiques — he just wasn’t terribly smart. His reviews often indicate that he misunderstood elements of the films he was watching.

Capote on Gore Vidal:

“Katherine Anne Porter had style. Willa Cather had great style. Hemingway got lost in his style because he sort of became a parody of himself. James Baldwin writes very well as an essayist. Gore Vidal has no style at all.

“Because Gore’s books are number one or two on the bestseller list doesn’t mean anything. That’s because he spends half his life on TV.

R130, I agree. He was a great writer but a simple-minded thinker. Jonathan Rosenbaum surpasses him on every level as a film critic.

Andrew Sarris on Pauline Kael:

[E}ven Miss K's most fervent admirers do not hold her to the humdrum standards of coherence and consistency to which the rest of us are accountable. Her critical apparatus has more in common with a wind machine than with a searchlight, and when all the papers and ticket stubs have stopped blowing around, it is difficult for the most orderly readers to find their bearings. Miss K is more an entertainer than an enlightener, and she is singularly ungenerous (at least in print) to her colleagues. She disdains the good manners (however teeth-clenched) of the scholarly community, and she scorns all the little film magazines that spawned her. For all her professed feminism, she has not been conspicuously kind to the increasing number of distaff reviewers in the field. Indeed, the increasingly perverse otherness of film criticism seems to cause her genuine distress despite all the success and recognition she has received. Her toleration of dissent is comparable in degree to Spiro Agnew's, and her capacity to communicate with any critic she hasn't spiritually castrated is virtually nil.

That's awkward ^ to read a film critic on a fellow film critic.

I miss the days when criticism was valid and interesting, and most of all influential and debatable. NY Times had some good critics as well.

Now they're mostly paid shills with the mentality of sheep who don't want to go against the grain. And there's plenty one can take the piss out of in today's culture.

She reminds me of nothing so much as a female impersonator in search of a female to impersonate.

[quote] Andrew Sarris on Pauline Kael:

Sarris wasn't as witty as Kael or as popular but I think history has proven him to be the "better" film critic.

The last two movie magazines that still print a mag are "Sight & Sound" and "Film Comment". I get them from the library and read them on my work breaks.

[quote] And some of those opinions, like loving Las Tango, are full of shit and don’t hold up.

No kidding--that movie has NOT aged well. And it was never great to begin with. I can only imagine how kinky Kael is with her butter. She thought Last Tango was like the most erotic movie ever.

Read her review of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, it's like she's talking about a movie you've never even seen. It's idiotic, how dense that review is.

r140, Kael really didn't get Kubrick at all.

I love reading Kael, but Sarris has a far more intellectual and grounded film theory. Kael is all feeling and emotion that does not extend the understanding of the art of the film, as Sarris does.

Ebert was middle of the road as a critic, definitely more of a populist writer. He was credited with bringing film criticism to the masses, but I think he may have remained a Chicago celebrity if not for his relationship with Gene Siskel.

But Ebert blossomed as a writer and essayist after he lost the capacity to speak. His book Life Itself is truly magnificent.

'Miss Minnelli rose from the stage as if from the grave."

Renata Adler did not alternate with Kael as THE NEW YORKER's film critic. That was Penelope Gilliatt. Adler was the lead film critic for the TIMES for one year, which was enough for both Adler and the TIMES, apparently. (See her collection, A YEAR IN THE DARK). James Broughton and Pauline Kael were never married, though he did father her child. While we're at it, I have never heard "Golf -- a good walk spoiled" attributed to Shaw; it is usually attributed to Mark Twain.

This also deserves mention regarding the terrible Last Tango in Paris. While Pauline was masturbating in the movie theater this is actually what happened:

In 2007, Schneider (who died in 2011, at the age of fifty-eight) discussed that scene in detail with a journalist, saying that it wasn’t in the script, that it was Brando’s idea, and that it was imposed upon her at the last minute on the set: “Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci.”

Sarris and Gilliatt were friends. I knew someone who used to go to word game parties with the two of them (and others).

Someone once described Diana Rigg's Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion as “vulnerable as the north face of the Eiger."

A newspaper critic called Anthony Hopkins’ King Lear “a Rotary pork butcher about to tell the stalls a dirty story”.

[quote] Sarris wasn't as witty as Kael or as popular but I think history has proven him to be the "better" film critic.

No one talks about Sarris today like Kael and most of his books are out of print. He could never get over that thrashing she gave the auteur theory in her review Circles & Squares, and he spent the rest of his life bringing her up in interviews when she paid him dust. And I don't consider him much of a critic. He was a terrible writer. He's much better writing monographs and film history in full-length books.

I'm glad she was the first to demolish the auteur theory. It has done more harm than good in the film industry (especially considering how it devalued the contributions of screenwriters and placed the directors on the pedestal as the supreme artist).

R96 here. I forgot to say that this quote is from Alfred Polgar, as if you bitches knew who that was...

Perhaps apocryphal, but a reporter interviewing Gandhi on his first visit to America is said to have asked him, "What do you think of western civilization?" To which, Gandhi is said to have replied, "I think it would be a good idea."

The auteur theory is far from dead; anyone who studies film is familiar with it. Kael never had a theory, just personal taste, which is why she is deliriously wrong on so many films, including Last Tango and 2001: A Space Odyssey. BTW, this is one reason she failed do miserably when she thought she could be a film maker.

“Absolute cack: appallingly written, witlessly directed and sung as if by mice being tortured. It makes Teletubbies look like The Iliad in comparison.”

Mamma Mia! Stephen Pollard, The Spectator

R153: But I think that’s why people continue to enjoy Kael today and not Sarris because she DIDN’T have a theory. Theories can be popular one day and forgotten or challenged the next. Many prefer to read an intelligent and witty analysis of a film than some dry academic essay that only a select few can understand. (By the way: Kael wasn’t the only one who panned 2001, Sarris also disliked the film and Kubrick in general. As different Kael and Sarris were in their approach to criticism, their taste often aligned with certain directors.)

And sure the auteur theory is still talked about in film studies, just as Kael is discussed as the first to raise some valid points about its shortcomings. And if you pick up any book on New Hollywood and 70s filmmaking Kael is often discussed at length, good or bad.

Her legacy as a film critic and one of the most influential in American history remains intact.

R137 I find Sarris uninteresting and his writing is not compelling. Kael was more direct and conversational. With Sarris , I want to say get to the point and i find myself scanning rather than reading.

From Sarris' review of Marco Bellochio's CHINA IS NEAR (1968)

Later when the two brothers are confronted with the imminence of their sister's abortion, rather than world revolution, a crisis more practical than theoretical, they are embarrassed to encounter each other in a movie theater, that modern refuge from reality.

[quote]That's awkward ^ to read a film critic on a fellow film critic.

Here's John Simon on Rex Reed:

How did Rex Reed come to pass? Did Andy Warhol's Frankenstein concoct him to spread the camp sensibility into the bloodstream of silent America via the Hearst Syndicate? Or did the media fabricate him to add a touch of Bill Blass class to the low couture of Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show"? Actually, Reed was wafted north by a breeze from the Gulf to make a writing career in New York and I have heard both Gloria Steinem and Liz Smith take rueful credit for helping him get published in their mass magazines.

More John Simon:

David Denby has hailed [Dressed to Kill] as the first great film of the eighties; Pauline Kael has splattered panegyrics across four pages of [italic]The New Yorker[/italic]. Two-page ads in the [italic]New York Times[/italic] are studded with hearty albeit shopworn superlatives, and the lines outside theaters where the film is playing look as if a bank were giving away - in the current, detestable pleonasm - free gifts. What [italic]Dressed to Kill[/italic] dispenses liberally, however, is sophomoric soft-core pornography, vulgar manipulation of the emotions for mere sensation, salacious but inept dialogue that is a cross between comic-strip Freudianism and sniggering double entendres, and a plot so full of holes as to be at best a dotted line.

I never got the appeal of Rex Reed as critic. He was on Geraldo in 1990 with a panel of other critics talking about the upcoming movies of the summer.

When they got to Dick Tracy, he trashed Madonna for five minutes, calling her a tramp and saying her panties must stink. Really vile stuff. The fraus in the audience had their mouths open in disgust.

Simon is absolutely right about Dressed To Kill.

Critic Robin Wood said Pauline Kael's "feminist consciousness is so underdeveloped one could barely describe it as embryonic."

I watched the recent documentary on Pauline Karl and she comes across as insufferable. I no longer have any admiration for her.

has Streep improved over time? I think that’s debatable. Her role selection has certainly declined.

R42 She's in her 70's, you moron. How much of a selection do you think is available to her at this age?

The fraus in the audience had their mouths open in disgust.

R159 And apparently so did you.

[quote]Leigh Hunt's description of Lord Byron's face

R81, do you think you could provide a quotation? And yes, I googled.

R163, you’re quite an unpleasant cunt.

Thanks. I am and I tell it like I see it.

Here is an example of Pauline’s pretentious terrible writing (and taste):

The Warriors” (1979)

“Walter Hill’s spectacle takes its story from Xenophon’s ‘Anabasis’ and its style from the taste of the modern urban dispossessed—in neon signs, graffiti, and the thrill of gaudiness. The film enters into the spirit of urban-male tribalism and the feelings of kids who believe that they own the streets because they keep other kids out of them. In this vision, cops and kids are all there is, and the worst crime is to be chicken. The movie is like visual rock, and it’s bursting with energy.”

"The Merm chewed up some so much scenery the audience had to duck from the splinters"

Kael's self-absorbed twattery was and is still repulsive.

"HISSSSSSSSSS!"

Didn't Pauline Kael also claim Orson Welles wasn't the one truly responsible for Citizn Kane? Terrible.

Camille Paglia on Susan Sontag:

"Ella Logan was written out of Kelly before it opened on Broadway. Congratulations, Miss Logan."

Gore Vidal on hearing that Truman Capote had died......" Wise career move "

OK r127 you are probably correct about Shampoo being the raver. I finally saw Heaven Can Wait a few years ago and found it unbearable. Warren Beatty as a top-ranked pro football player? He is way too lanky and lean.

Around the time she did The French Lieutenant's Woman/Sophie's Choice/Silkwood, Pauline called Meryl Streep "the red-eye express."

R176 Obviously, her review of Shampoo (1975) was used in its entirety in the print ads to promote the film. On Heaven Can Wait she said "This little smudge of a movie makes one laugh a few times, but it doesn't represent moviemaking-it's pifflemaking."

Kael was also friends with screenwriter Robert Towne. I believe that's one of the reasons why she raved about Shampoo. (She had mixed feelings about Chinatown, but I think that had more to do with Polanski's direction and felt his absurdist style was incompatible with Towne's.)

The Warriors was the most stupid movie ever. You couldnt even enjoy the hot guys because their costumes were ridiculous .

R172 Watch Netfix's Mank about Herman J. Mankiewicz who wrote Citizen Kane. Kane is based on William Randolph Hearst and Mankiewicz a noted newspaperman was a good friends with Hearst and was often been a guest at his home. The screenplay for Citizen Kane is based on Mankiewicz's knowledge of the newspaper business, and Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies and the credit for Kane's narrative structure belongs to Mankiewicz who had written the screenplay for a 1933 film The Power and the Glory about a ruthless railroad tycoon who fails in his personal life, and it was told in flashbacks and narration from his funeral. Shades of Kane. Welles was notorious for wanting to take credit for everything and Mankiewicz had to fight to get screen credit for what was almost exclusively his screenplay. Kael's essay Raising Kane pointed this out.

Gregg Toland, for that matter, also deserves enormous credit for Citizen Kane's "lool."

"look"...sorry

R172, and everything R180 says is part of a larger project. She thought the auteur theory was bullshit and so often advocated for the contributions of designers, screenwriters and actors rather than just credit the director for everything.

Citizen Cane is a remarkable film because of many people's contributions...just like Kael said.

The only time Pauline is mentioned here anymore is in reference to her bitchy comments about Meryl Streep (same with Hepburn, both of whom are dead). I really doubt people are seeking out her old reviews, unless it’s a film school assignment. Streep recently referenced one of Pauline’s comments (she needs to laugh more and suffer less) and said she took it to heart.

[quote]Gregg Toland, for that matter, also deserves enormous credit for Citizen Kane's "lool."

And, for that matter, Robert Wise as the film's editor also deserves enormous credit for its brilliance

I love The Warriors esp the baseball furies scene. The soundtrack is awesome.

No, R3, YOU'RE wrong. It was an honest and fair assessment of Streep at the time. As for a movie star eclipsing the fame of a writer--you write as if that's something unusual.

R18, you're a cunt nobody quotes.

Most of this thread is about Pauline Kael, and there's a reason for that: because she still very much matters, and because she was so distinct in her tastes and as a writer, she still engenders as much agitation from her dismissive, defensive detractors as from her ardent admirers. I had a good laugh at one of the posts above that accused Kael of not having a sufficient feminist conscience, which has to the most hopelessly irrelevant thing you could say about her (it's also untrue). Pauline would have enjoyed laughing at that herself.