Word: kael
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...CARE ABOUT Miss Kael's criticism as literature," John Leonard, the facile New York Times book critic, is quoted as saying on the inside flap of Reeling, the latest collection of movie reviews from Pauline Kael. Leonard's judgement may strike many as over-blown, or at least as a case of the pot calling the kettle sterling. But people gossip and debate more today about critics and commentators than about the events they cover. Brendan Gill cashed in on this new phenomenon with "Here at the New Yorker," as did Timothy Crouse with "Boys on the Bus." This summer...
...this critics' golden age, Pauline Kael has unmistakably earned her pedestal. With a gritty, grappling brand of opinionation (and largely because of it), her review slot at the New Yorker has often produced sparkling minor masterpieces. She's become the Chopin of the pan. When she lights into "Lost Horizon," the multi-million dollar clunker in Reeling, it's a virtuoso performance. "To lambast a Ross Hunter production is like flogging a sponge," she writes. "He is to movies what Liberace is to music, and once, on a television talk show, I saw them both. . .and the two unctuous smiles...
Lately, though, the critics of the critics have begun to turn on Kael. After praising her to the skies for a decade (she won a National Book award for her last batch of reviews), they now accuse her of floating a series of "puff pieces." The controversy came to a head a year ago, when she gave herself over to unabashed adulation for Robert Altman's Nashville. She called it "an orgy without excess" and made it sound like a gentle, cinematic orgasm. ("I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness.") Before, her fans had loved her pyrotechnic...
...like Sleeper, Lacombe, Lucien and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she wrestles her feelings down with words. She won't let go until she's pinned down the fine distinctions, until she's exposed all the vacuums. This is the talent overlooked by all those who have resented Kael all along for dictating opinions. They miss the point entirely: we don't learn what to think about films from Kael, we learn how to think about them (and not in academic explication, but in terms of gut reaction). She shows us how to take a reaction like "yeah...
...number of Reeling's reviews, she loses (or more precisely abandons) this fine cutting edge, perhaps for the first time. Starting with Last Tango in Paris and picking up at the end of the collection with Shampoo, Godfather II and Nashville, Kael does something she's never done before: she lifts her analytical tools from the film itself and begins to sell it to the reader; she seems to ladle on superlatives for the publicists to lap up. About Tango, she writes, miscalculating badly, that "this is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long...