Word: kael
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...eight-hour Nashville saga for ABC, and Martin Scorsese hoped to restore many of the sequences cut from New York, New York for telecast on NBC; so far, neither dream has been fulfilled. Bernardo Bertolucci is a compulsive tinkerer. After the release of Last Tango in Paris, Critic Pauline Kael complained to him that one of the best paragraphs in her review described a sequence that Bertolucci...
...Village last week, as members of the New York literary Mafia exchanged notes on their crowd's bloodiest case of assault and battery in years. The perpetrator: New Yorker Writer Renata Adler, 41. The victim: fellow New Yorker Writer, Film Critic and 1974 National Book Award Winner Pauline Kael...
Reviewing Kael's latest book of movie reviews, When the Lights Go Down (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $18.95), in the Aug. 14 New York Review of Books, Adler not only calls the volume "worthless," she proceeds to incinerate Kael on the gravest imaginable grounds for a New Yorker writer: vulgarity, shoddy writing and sloppy thinking. Adler admits that until recently she had been an admirer of Kael's because "she was the critic everyone knew and talked about." But on closer analysis-something Adler feels that no one has accorded Kael's writing in years-a different conclusion...
...from the book: "Swallowing this movie is an unnatural act" (I Will, I Will ...for Now); "a belch from the Nixon era" (Rooster Cogburn); "the same brand of sanctifying horse manure" (Bound for Glory); and "his way of pissing on us" (The Entertainer). Worse, says Adler, long sections of Kael's writing suffer from lapses in logic and an irritating habit of relying on rhetorical questions to make a point. Adler's evidence: 26 examples gleaned from the book: "Is it just the pompadour or is he wearing a false nose?" "Is it relevant that Bertolucci...
...review, which comes not long after Kael returned from a desultory nine-month stint as a Hollywood consultant, made others in the word business a bit nervous. "Unfortunate," sniffed New Yorker Editor William Shawn, who quickly added that "every writer has a right to express himself." "Absolutely terrific!" said New York Times Critic Frank Rich. "I'm just glad it wasn't written about me." "Adler," said New York Magazine Critic David Denby, "had an 'oldfashioned' notion of prose." "I don't think that Pauline is a rigorous, logical thinker," volunteered National Review Film Critic...