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April 02, 2008

Raising Kael, or, "I Lost It On The Internet"

Lots of movie crickets are losing their jobs. So... where was Pauline Kael this week? Not just in Great Barrington, Massachusetts: Mark Harris invites the august cricket over to Entertainment Weekly: "Perhaps because, in the history of movies, pictures had a 30-year head start on words, many cinephiles still talk approvingly of ''pure cinema,'' defining that term by the degree to which a director can speak entirely with his camera, not with words. Directors with writerly passions are sometimes treated with mild condescension; they're not seen as ''naturals,'' because, as Pauline Kael once put it, ''a movie that is primarily words tends to evaporate.'' (She wasn't entirely wrong, but giggle over that one the next time you watch All About Eve or Annie Hall.)" Liam Lacey takes a spin at the Globe & Mail talking up Martin Scorsese: "He has frequently used their music on his soundtracks, perhaps most notably in his breakthrough film Mean Streets, when he spent $30,000 of a $750,000 budget to buy the rights to Jumpin' Jack Flash and Tell Me. He wanted The Last Time but couldn't afford it. As Pauline Kael wrote of that film, "The music is the electricity in the air of this movie; the music is like an engine that the character moves to. Johnny Boy, the most susceptible, half dances through the movie ... He enjoys being out of control - he revels in it - and we can feel the music turning him on." Bill Katovsky introduces the tsk-tsker to HuffPost folks: "In the waning months of the primary season, she's become like an old Pink Panther movie, in which the same scene goes on way too long. (This would drive film critics like Pauline Kael nuts. "Director Black [sic!] Edwards simply doesn't know when to quit!") Neither does Hillary." For McClatchy, Bruce Dancis brings PK to the dance over Bonnie & Clyde: "Film critics Bosley Crowther and Pauline Kael: The most powerful film critic of his day, the New York Times' Crowther hated Bonnie and Clyde, calling it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie. At first a flop at the box-office when Warner Bros. gave it a halfhearted release in April 1967, Bonnie and Clyde became the most-talked-about movie in America after Beatty took over the publicity campaign - featuring the unforgettable slogan "They're young ... they're in love ... and they kill people" - and engineered its re-release in August 1967. Aiding the film's critical acceptance was a lengthy essay by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, in which she strongly defended the film's artistic use of violence and called it "the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate." Gene Seymour's also on the B&C beat: Kael's October 1967 essay on the film, which led to her being hired full-time by The New Yorker, began with the rhetorical question, "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?" and ended with the observation that, "by making us care about the robber lovers," the film "has put the sting back into death." Glenn Kenny, whilst boxing the ears of Chapter 27 at Premiere: "The exchange between Chapman and the cabbie takes place about three minutes into the movie. 81 minutes to go. (Boy, and Pauline Kael thought it was a chore to spend time with the main characters of Raging Bull. At least Scorsese's film gave you something to look at.)" Hannah Brown, Jerusalem Post on a metaphor-heavy picture: "To paraphrase the late New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, most movies give you so little, it's hard to ask for more from one as thoughtful as this." The Washington Post's obit for Richard Widmark: "Kiss of Death brought Mr. Widmark his only Academy Award nomination, for a supporting role... Pauline Kael wrote that when Mr. Widmark grins onscreen, "his white teeth are more alarming than fangs." Ah, but Ryan Gilbey in New Statesman goes a bit farther than a curtsy of citation: "The critic Pauline Kael once asked: "If art isn't entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?" The films of the Austrian director Michael Haneke answer resoundingly in the affirmative. His motto seems to be "Spare the rod and spoil the audience". Nowhere is this more prevalent than in Funny Games, his 1997 critique of cinematic violence disguised as a thriller. Haneke gets the best of both worlds: he piles on the suspense as ruthlessly as any slasher film, then uses Brechtian distantiation devices to berate us for succumbing to excitement." Bonus, from Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger, Ms. Kael speaks!

Posted by Ray Pride at April 2, 2008 02:00 AM

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