Word: kael
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...Center is a sterile, nursery, school place to watch a movie, and they tend to bark orders out of loudspeakers about food, tobacco and such things, but the screen is pretty big. The choice of features is a great one, though, back from the good old days when Pauline Kael's proficiency and reputation as grande dame of film criticism was at a higher level than today. Everybody panned Bonnie and Clyde, Kael came out and gave it a rave, and one by one, gradually, the critics changed their line. Maybe by some freak of nature one of the rare...
...have to ignore lines like that if you're going to enjoy The Towering Inferno, but the view that the movie itself is a monument to bullshit and concupiscence is unfounded. It's very easy to hype a popular film by calling it a cinematic masterpiece, as Pauline Kael has done so unfortunately with movies like Shampoo and Last Tango in Paris. The disaster film is an urban adventure, like a police or hospital melodrama, but the very magniture of the pseudo-events it chronicles--possible only on screen--give it a dignity beyond its intrinsic merit. When combined with...
...PAULINE KAEL called it "the cattleprod," the theory being that today's audiences are so numb from perennial TV that a movie in a theater needs a long blunt instrument wired with several hundred volts and applied to an armpit, perhaps, or some appropriate erogenous zone, in order to elicit the merest twitch of a response...
...Kael is perfectly right in sensing that "he somehow thinks that Nick and Mabel really love each other and that A Woman Under the Influence is a tragic love story." Perhaps the crux of the movie is the scene where Mabel's husband, Nick, yields to outside pressures and agrees to commit her to a mental institution. Mabel tries to defend herself: "I always understood you and you always understood me--till death do us part, Nick...
...Kael criticizes A Woman Under the Influence for being "entirely tendentious: it's all planned, yet is isn't thought out." Her initial premise is wrong; Cassavetes is no Laingian disciple. Laing's The Politics of Experience is an ode to schizophrenia. He claims that they aren't really mad; but that society is. The thrust of the movie is not, however, to explore the reaches of madness but to scrutinize the problems of a love relationship. To call Cassavetes a Laingian is to assume that he analyzes what he sees the same way an intellectual does. But the only...