Word: kael
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Gill's account is laced with some acid. John O'Hara is drubbed for his vanity and status seeking. Thurber is recalled as a man "never so happy as when he could cause two old friends to have a falling out." Gill justifiably twits Movie Critic Pauline Kael for long-windedness and openly recounts the depressions, breakdowns, bouts of alcoholism and premature deaths that struck a number of his colleagues. He resurrects no quips that set the fabled Algonquin Round Table on a roar. Most drinking staffers, he reports, preferred dark saloons "suitable for people with a glum...
Last Tango in Paris. This has suffered in the year and a half since it came out, inevitably, after the fuss Pauline Kael generated, and the erratic nature of her criticism since then. That famous "it has altered the face of an art form" review was almost a watershed in her work. But the problem was that she shifted the emphasis the wrong way--toward sex, and played into the hands of the newsmagazines who turned it into a lurid porno flick at worst and a "shockingly honest" film at best, though they would have done that anyway. In fact...
...currently overwhelming concern with public affairs is evident too. Among the 70, only two poets are listed (the late W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell) and four major novelists (Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth). Popular critics also appear: The New Yorker's film reviewer Pauline Kael, who is in the third group, a fact that may curl the lip of New York magazine's theater critic John Simon, who just squeaked into the fourth and lowest category. Half of the chosen live within what Kadushin calls "lunch distance" of New York -a 50-mile limit...
Conrack opened in New York a month ago. It received two pre-reviews. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael praised the freshness of the story: a young South Carolinian goes to isolated Yamacraw Island to teach illiterate black children. Kael loved the lustiness and poetic charm of the hero, Pat Conroy (known to his students as Conrack), who overcomes reactionary school officials and intransigent students and parents to give his class a sense of the world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic...
...inclined critics," proclaiming that those who like Conrack (and other more-or-less "message" movies, including Sounder and Hoa Binh) are hopeless much-headed idealists, overwhelmed by uplift. But the critics Mad Andrew wrote about are figments of his imagination, since the only famous critics who praised the film (Kael and Kauffmann) are rigorous, not at all the "melting marsh-mallows" of his bile-ridden column. Sarris took potshots at the actual Conroy as well as at the film and its defenders, vaguely condemning him--though rhetorically denying it--for being young, energetic, individualistic, and anti-establishment. (Everything film critics...