Word: kael
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...neither diversion nor academics attracted '60s students. The movies showed a world outside the university town, and unlike other forms of literature they were still unburdened by the gospel-like critical judgments of an earlier generation. There was something fresh even in old movies. What the movies represent, Pauline Kael wrote at the end of the '60s, is that "the world doesn't work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be." Kael felt that way in her youth, and by the '60s the feeling was widespread...
...Kael still felt somehow guilty about moviegoing: "And the theaters frequented by true moviegoers--those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers--depress us," she wrote. The true moviegoers were never displaced. Some people spent seemingly all their time at the Brattle or the Welles (the addition of the bar made it possible to live inside the Brattle building for "an indefinite period of time," albeit on a liquid diet, a Crimson critic noted in 1957) but the people lining up for the first Bergman and Bogart festivals led real lives that the movies helped enrich...
French cinematographer Jean Boffety has helped give this world a pale damp beauty. Critic Pauline Kael compared the effect to the mood of Faulkner, but there is something lyric and almost painfully beautiful which could exist nowhere outside of film. There are wonderful details of gas stations and motor courts which recall Walker Evans, like the shots taken through screen doors to which bits of a painted bread ad still adhere or the recurrent presence of Coke bottles with their pale green glass, and Coke signs, even at the entrance of the state prison. But the effect of this carefully...
Last Tango presents sex without a disguise, and this scares off an audience. Even Pauline Kael, the most ardent defender of the film, was too busy figuring out things like whether Bernardo Bertolucci had made the first truly erotic film to explain her emotional reaction. The way audiences and other critics talked about the film suggests that people still have trouble thinking about their emotional reactions to cinema sex. Perhaps the emotions Last Tango in Paris elicited were too subtle to allow clear thoughts. More likely it's just that a moviegoer has a harder time saying "I was aroused...
State of Siege. Costa-Gavras' latest political drama (following Z and The Confession) written by Franco Solinas who scripted The Battle of Algiers. It was hailed as a masterpiece by one local Marxist critic, and as a radical hype by Pauline Kael. She liked the message of the movie which castigated American imperialism; what she disliked, and rightly, was he slick surface that injects the message into your veins without giving you the data needed to consider the issues raised. Yves Montand has the sort of impeccably cool father face perfect for the part he plays. His role is based...