Word: kael
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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DEWITT: Yes, but not as much. That was a pretty good movie. I think people came down too hard on it after Pauline Kael wrote that ridiculous rave--the one that got plastered over all the ads. Philip Kaufman has a witty visual style, but the ending was a bummer. People in San Francisco are getting a little too mellow.... mel, if you will. Everyone...
...rest of the movie. Whatever fear there is in this comes from predictability and inevitability, not surprise. The real surprise is the critical reaction. How ironic that so many of the critics who find in this movie a condemnation of '70s conformity are falling in line behind Pauline Kael's grossly irresponsible rave...
USED TO BE, life at the movies was faster, meatier, and larger than what we saw every day. The women were hotter, and their men were cooler. Enemies sought an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but friendship was thicker than blood. As Pauline Kael put it, it was "kiss kiss, bang bang...
...Insiders in Las Vegas and Hollywood may be doing some wild signaling themselves. The novel has an enticing roman à clef flavor even though Puzo dismisses the issue with a typically tough and ready remark: "How dare they think they are part of my creation?" Nevertheless, Pauline Kael will be flattered when she recognizes herself as the highly praised film critic Clara Ford. Certain agents, and some executives at Universal who shortchanged Puzo for his script of Earthquake, will not be so pleased...
...which only goes to reinforce the fact that nobody cares more genuinely about movies than Kael. They move and compel her to weigh each nuance, to mull over each jarring image, and to track down every pop association like an amateur sociologist-sleuth. She even lifts and carries the torah for the whole creative tradition in her long, worried, and proscriptive essay on the film industry, "On the Future of the Movies." And when she's in top form, Kael merits the hackneyed testimonial, "she cares enough to be brilliant." Hopefully she will weather the hyperbolic fuss over film critics...