Word: kael
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kael this is another form of Madison Avenud militancy, which flatters youth with a new cosmetic image, and is more irresponsible than the old formulas of Doris Dayland banality. For the message movies tune their politics to an ad man's pitch. They mainline the message "America is all crap" and project an American self-hatred not only on the present but on the past (Tell Them Willie Boy is Here). They pat you on the back for paranoia with pictures of a world pitted against you. And by leaving you with the feeling that the only thing left...
...THAT KAEL is attacking generally is a Big Movie Industrial Complex. Movies are ties to big money and she points her heaviest guns at the new conglomerate-appointed studio moguls (hipper Louis B. Mayers or Darryl F. Zanucks) who sport long hair while dishing out the "terroist utopian thinking" that threatens to stalemate the numbness of the day. For Kael this bureaucratized Pop, this self-serving negativism, is a mass form of deprivation. Brutal movies don't attack present brutality, they practically glamorize it. The mess of movies that package bankrupt values in million dollar budgets, glossy surfaces...
...feeling that the fuming Pauline Kael is touched at bottom by nostalgia--she still doesn't sound jaded. I picture a middle to late-middle-aged lady with a rather racy past behind her--first a movie pioneer, then a movie regular, now settling into her movie watching position as if keeping faith with a bad habit she deserves. She is caught right up in the screen, wrapped up in it, when suddenly it stumbles. Something smells crooked, a bit dirty. She hasn't asked for much, but when she gets less dressed up as more she sets her instincts...
...KAEL IS ALL for the underdog. At times she seems to hunger for that ole simple straight talkin' soul, that sensibility set aside for off hours and cherished on visits to rural small towns--the one she hopes movies won't estrange us from more than urban living already has. I think that this nostalgia sometimes gets in her way, confused her sense signals. When she calls the gangling, gifted loser Pookie Adams (of A Sterile Cuckoo) "a resonant American archetype," I get the feeling that she has gone overboard on her identification. Or perhaps it is just that hitting...
...make up for so many tough punches--being a non-stop shrew can talk you out of likinig yourself. So you come out for an underdog that doesn't deserve your support. Or if you see only one brand of stereotype any other looks unconventional, and therefore good. Kael is so convinced that the worst sell-out in movies is thinking big that she is apt to be lenient on the small scale, thought or no thought...