Word: kael
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...Pauline Kael, at one time arguably the best film critic in operation, has turned into the Hubert Humphrey of film criticism. She comes on chatty and playful when talking about film techniques, valuing good stars above acting and sensual excess over rigor, all the time letting us know that under that tigress bite of hers beats a heart which overflows with sympathy. She makes sufficient noises in the vague directions of liberalism to insure our recognition that she cares in the correct way about moral and political issues which the films she sees might raise. She is overwhelmingly ebullient...
Rarely has this been more apparent than at Kael's April 16 appearance at Leverett House. (Of course, the new style of Harvard audience -- spruced up and ready to kiss ass - almost insured the result.) Ms. Kael was introduced by a fellow in a three-piece suit who uttered some innocuous pleasantries about how disappointed he and the others were when Leslie Fiedler and not Kael dominated the podium at a recent PMLA convention. Two hours later, as Kael finished answering questions from the film buffs and cognoscenti who surrounded her, the more skeptical among us wondered what...
...Kael is sometimes prone to theatrics when she files off the handle, but I think that she has to be. When the media hype pushes the reviewer into the role of fashion setter-everything he likes becomes a new peak - he has to come out extra loud to fight against its pressures...
...Since Kael is so loyal a defender of youth vis-a-vis "the riot movie fad" it seems treacherous to fault her on the subject. Nevertheless, while she treats upper-class enervation as a given, when Antonioni's activist youths (Zabriskie Point) are zombies it means he is alienated. The assumption blights her reasoning. Especially since she insists the America is a better place to live than Antonioni makes it out to be - which puts her on the side of straight liberal anti-radical youth...
...POINT is that you have to be careful when you read Kael. Careful because she's so good. Her influence is tremendous: she got my mother to go to Loving and then to mindlessly applaud it because she had come equipped with Kael's permission to read herself into its middle-class sweat...