The MidMo sponsored screening of "The wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia" is tonight at 8 pm at The Crest. Director Julian Nitzberg will be in attendance who sounds like and interesting guy and a FOMF (that's Friend of Old Man Foster). It's ten bucks, which is sadly, normal for a movie in primetime these days (and people will still only pay 5 bucks to see a band!), but will be worth it. It doesn't look like it's going to rain tonight.
Speaking of movies, I picked up a collection of Pauline Kael's reviews at a thrift store and I am really digging it. It's called Taking it all in, and it's her seventh collection. It covers her reviews for the New Yorker from '79 to '83. The first thing that struck me is how looonnngg they are. That' what always strikes me when I look at old magazines. Things have gotten so blurby, it sucks. The second thing that struck me is that she HATED Raging Bull. Wait, don't stop reading here. Reading more of her reviews I figured out that she pretty much hated modern movies, but without knowing that's what she hated. She couldn't know that the movies that she despised would go on to shape modern movie making much more than the movies she loved. For instance, The King of Comedy (which I like), she criticized for being so empty and ugly, but think about it, doesn't that movie seem like the forefather of a whole style of film-making? Like Todd Solondz' work, for one. Hey, I ain't no movie critic, this is just what occurred to me.And it's so thrilling that she effortlessly brings a strong female perspective into her reviews. I love reading her lavishly detailed descriptions of how actors and actresses look and their physical presence, and her obvious affinity for sex scenes (hope no one thinks it's sexist that I think that stems from her being a woman).
She would hate movies today so fucking much!
Anyway, I'll let her speak from herself. This is from her review of The Return of the Jedi. She liked Empire, but hated ROTJ:
Lucas may be be on to something: that for children (and some adults) a movie that's actively, insistently exhausting can pass for entertainment. Lucas produces the busiest movies of all time; they're made on the assumption that the audience must be distracted every minute...I don't mean that Lucas means to shortchange the audiences; quite the reverse. He gives them a load of movie-so much that their expectations are rammed down their throats....
It's one of the least amusing ironies of movie history that in the seventies, when the "personal" filmmakers seemed to be gaining acceptance, the thoughtful, quiet, George Lucas made the quirkily mechanical Star Wars-a film so successful that it turned the whole industry around and put it on a retrograde course, where it's now joining forces with video games manufacturers. If a filmmaker wants backing for a new project, there'd better be a video game in it. Producers are putting so much action and so little character into their movies that there's nothing for a viewer to latch on to.
And so on! From 1983!
8 comments:
She was a Jew born in Petaluma! Even better
Kael's reviews are sometimes spot on - other times she seems to take out her "having a bad day" on the filmmaker.
And hey, who doesn't like Empire and hates Jedi?
A Petaluma Jew? What? Are supposed to start believing in Bigfoot next?
By the way Dan Barnes called all of this.
Charles
ps. In all seriousness, this lady sounds awesome!
It's ironic that Kael was so much more interesting than other critics, but the films she lauded were often much less interesting than the ones she ripped apart. I'm going for the opposite effect myself.
Called it!
-DB
I take it you were unimpressed by the Reel Geezers..... If so I say... c'mon(!), "penis is a perfectly fine word!"
When I was 12-13 or so, geek that I was, I checked out and read almost all of Pauline Kael's books of compiled reviews from the Carmichael Public Library over the course of a year. Since this was at the dawn of video/cable, I hadn't seen 95 percent of what she was writing about, so I've been catching up ever since. And most other film critics are still catching up with what a great writer she was.
Stephen Glass
So what did she say about sex scenes??!! Come on, spill it woman! I'm not the only one who wants to know...
She just clearly enjoys writing about them. I loved her review of Personal Best, the erotic lady athlete movie with Margaux Hemingway, complete with steamy locker room shower scenes. Gotta put it on my netflix queue.
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