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...
...Pauline Kael's transformations are upsetting not only because of her influence, but because of what some of us once felt Kael herself could have become. If the early '60s, when she wrote for small film journals, literary quarterlies, and an occasional Atlantic or Harper's, she seemed one of the few writers since Agee able to avoid the occasional literary pretensiousness of Eastern critics, the self-justifying defenses of Hollywood hacks, and the gassy theorizing of academics. However, especially since her third book (Going Steady) appeared in 1970, she has become an established New Yorker commodity, and increasingly self...
...Lost It At the Movies, Kael recalls that when she was broadcasting reviews for KPFA in San Francisco, she received the following letter...
Dear Miss Kael, Since you know so much about the art of film, why don't you spend your time making it? But first, you will need a pair of balls...
...Miss Kael replied: "Movies are made and criticism is written by the use of intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination and discrimination. I suggest it is time you and your cohorts stop thinking with your genital jewels." And I suggest that now is the time for Kael to return to the standards of the first sentence before her own gems get out of hand...