Word: kael
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...PAULINE KAEL has always been my father's favorite movie reviewer. To me she is titan critic of them all, often bigger than the movies she writes about, and I have the feeling that she would appreciate the distinction. It comes out of the fact that movies were elevated to an art form as part of the Pop impulse of the sixties, and under the domination of Pop, people started taking the movie messages more seriously than they ever had before, which makes the job of the critic all the more critical. Movie makers got more pretentious, and superlatives were...
...Kael knows how dangerous movies are. How a slick upbeat surface can bowl over and infatuate your senses, how a movie's immediacy can hit you with its message without giving you the data needed to consider the issues it raises; how flashy technology can play upon your emotional vulnerability and creep into your bloodstream. A commercially calculated cynicism can warp, even wreck your beliefs...
Still those sex scenes are beautiful. All Bertolucci needs is a tough producer and a good screenplay. And I think we should be charitable to the woman who helped make his inevitable commercial success possible -- Miss Pauline Kael. It's clear that the glittering combination of a favorite director and Marlon Brando overcame, in her eyes, the poor acting and pretentiousness (which Kael usually hits on). The film seems to have struck her where she often seems to think: right between her legs. The orgasmic New Yorker outpouring remains, alas, far more intriguing than what the filmmakers have spewed forth...
PERHAPS MOST of the bewilderment which has greeted the film comes from Pauline Kael's typically confused notion that it depicts "women as the Other." But the film is interested not in these women's emotion, but the intelligence and intuitions which direct these emotions. The case can be made much more purely with women because they are so human, and here are divorced from any encounter with external social conflicts. Bergman, in fact, makes a far more subtle dig at the bourgeois than Kael gives him credit for: the men are cartoon figures, unable to bring their families...
...Your cover story on Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris [Jan. 22] conveys the false impression that in 1966 I suggested that Brando should quit acting; it includes the sentence "Pauline Kael's dismissal notwithstanding, Brando's colleagues by and large have defended him." My way of dismissing him was to write about him in 1966 as "the most exciting American actor on the screen." to vote for him as best actor of 1967 for Reflections in a Golden Eye. to review him in The New Yorker. Feb. 10. 1968. as "our greatest actor," and, again. March...