Word: kael
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...live in perilous times--or at least splayed ones. It's not so much that things are going to hell in a handbasket; it's more that they're meandering about sniffing in garbage cans. Paulene Kael came up with at least eight great lines during the 1970s, and one of them was: "Unless you're feeble minded, as you get older you can see that the odds get worse...
...YORKER, he is a meatball amidst the linguinous prose of Pauline Kael, et al, and in book form his essays stand up well. They are not meant to be read all together at one sitting, but to be savored, like stuffed peppers in chili sauce. If one dare bother to complain, Allen may not be clever enough. His stories are a form of verbal slapstick; he is desperately self-conscious when he puns...
...eight-hour Nashville saga for ABC, and Martin Scorsese hoped to restore many of the sequences cut from New York, New York for telecast on NBC; so far, neither dream has been fulfilled. Bernardo Bertolucci is a compulsive tinkerer. After the release of Last Tango in Paris, Critic Pauline Kael complained to him that one of the best paragraphs in her review described a sequence that Bertolucci...
...from the book: "Swallowing this movie is an unnatural act" (I Will, I Will ...for Now); "a belch from the Nixon era" (Rooster Cogburn); "the same brand of sanctifying horse manure" (Bound for Glory); and "his way of pissing on us" (The Entertainer). Worse, says Adler, long sections of Kael's writing suffer from lapses in logic and an irritating habit of relying on rhetorical questions to make a point. Adler's evidence: 26 examples gleaned from the book: "Is it just the pompadour or is he wearing a false nose?" "Is it relevant that Bertolucci...
...review, which comes not long after Kael returned from a desultory nine-month stint as a Hollywood consultant, made others in the word business a bit nervous. "Unfortunate," sniffed New Yorker Editor William Shawn, who quickly added that "every writer has a right to express himself." "Absolutely terrific!" said New York Times Critic Frank Rich. "I'm just glad it wasn't written about me." "Adler," said New York Magazine Critic David Denby, "had an 'oldfashioned' notion of prose." "I don't think that Pauline is a rigorous, logical thinker," volunteered National Review Film Critic...