| ashu |
Posted
on 21-Sep-01 01:34 AM
As a movie-lover and who also reads review of movies he has yet to see,
I was sad to learn of the demise of Pauline Kael.
Kael was a movie reviewer at the New Yorker magazine for many
years, and, as a reader, I have always enjoyed reading and re-reading her
movie reviews (conveniently collected and published in book forms later).
I like and admire Kael's intelligence, her making fun of bad movies, her sense
of humor, and her just having fun, watching and writing about movies in
a jargon-less prose.
May her soul rest in peace.
******************
Some exerpts from her New Yorker interview (some of these insights are applicable in other contexts too, like posting stuff here:
ESPEN: What makes you read a movie critic regularly?
KAEL: Flashes of insight—especially about what the movie means and how it affects us. But I'll gladly take them about a performance, the sets—whatever. I'll even settle for a good phrase. There are eminent critics—steady, intelligent—who have never had a perception that could spark a fresh thought in anybody. They're so higher-degree educated they're drained. You read them and think, Yah, yah, yah. I'll read anyone who makes me laugh and is on target.
ESPEN: Which did you like more, to pan or to praise?
KAEL: Panning can be fun—you roll up your sleeves and head into the Augean stable. But it's also showoffy and cheap—it isn't sustaining. If you really like something, writing becomes humble and stirring. You give yourself to the work you're describing. You want to do it justice, and you want to share the pleasure it has given you. Writing about it intensifies your own pleasure.
ESPEN: Did you ever think you'd been cruel?
KAEL: Yes, and I knew it at the time I was writing. It wasn't being cruel to be kind, either. There's so much intellectual sloppiness out there that sometimes you have to be ruthless to keep a sane basis for writing about pop culture. And sometimes a cruel remark—even if it's an overstatement—is the best way to get a point across.
ESPEN: Do you think there are many independent-minded critics at work now?
KAEL: Some—there are always some. But the vast majority are swept up in the campaigns for movies and in the atmosphere at the time. For example, Woody Allen's "Manhattan Murder Mystery" is, I think, the most enjoyable movie he's made in years, but it was passed over, maybe because it's so light in tone, or maybe because it wasn't fashionable at that moment to like a Woody Allen movie. The picture is a dud as a mystery, but it's a lovely marital comedy. Maybe co-writing once again with Marshall Brickman helped restore Allen to the timing he used to have. And when he and Diane Keaton get a rhythm going it's as if they'd never stopped being comedy teammates.
You can read the rest at:
http://www.newyorker.com/FROM_THE_ARCHIVE/ARCHIVES/?010910fr_archive03
oohi
ashu
ktm, nepal
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