sandbox pauline kael and 70s lookback book club thread

Right, people can be touchy for lots of other reasons. Or not even touchy, they can be exercising cool, merciless logic.

As I say, I'm only halfway through the panel discussion, but I'll mention in fairness that Edelstein--I think it was him; I was listening this morning, not watching--says the same thing that Marcus and a couple of you here say, that he thinks the biography presents a mean portrait of her towards the end that doesn't jibe with his personal experience. But he doesn't discredit the book because of that; he seems to think it's a good book, and at least a couple of the panelists--Paglia, who didn't know Kael, and Toback, who obviously knew her very well--think it's an excellent book. Admittedly, when the author's sitting right beside you, that undoubtedly shapes what you say to some extent.

Read download of first few chapters of BK on PK. When he is just narrating events or quoting P it is good but when he tries to untangle, explain or reverse engineer someone else's motivation or behavior can't tell what the heck is going on. Still seems like it should be worth reading up to the "and then she reviewed" part, which starts at what page exactly?

You're in luck! The rest of the book is 10,000,000 Nights at the Movies.

To paraphrase LBJ, if I've lost James, I've lost the country.

You still have Morbius

The more I get into this (knowing the end), the more "hatchet job" does seem a bit much (if Marcus threw the book down around the '70s period, I understand why he'd assume that, though). The guy obviously still has sympathy for Kael, but his decision to meld review quotes and personal life anecdotes is questionable enough without him constantly throwing in his two cents about whether or not she was right about a film.

It's just a sloppy, arguably hacky way to go about a bio, and I can't imagine an audience that could be satisfied by this book other than people obsessed with cinema enough to be familiar and informed about her work, but who have no doubt she needs to be knocked down a peg. Who else would tolerate or accept him ending a chapter with For all her excitement there was a certain lack of cohesiveness in her review of Prizzi's Honor that she had seldom shown. It seemed overlong, and not quite all of a piece, as if she were so astonished to find a film this good that she was no longer quite sure how to convey her enthusiasm after just a handful of perfectly fine mini-quotes from the review? Who else would take that kind of conjecture on faith? And if you weren't already invested in the subject matter, who would even get this far?

sorry for the rhetorical questions, renata

I guess that's as much as you're going to come around on the book--fair enough. My arguments in this thread have primarily been against two phrases: "hatchet job" and "hackwork." I think of the former as being written out of personal pique or vendetta, with the express purpose of discrediting someone. "Hackwork" to me can mean sloppily researched, poorly written, or written quickly and cavalierly, as a way to cash in on something. I don't believe any of those things even remotely apply to A Life in the Dark. Specific complaints about how much personal opinion Kellow should be allowed to interject, or your problems with the Prizzi's Honor quote (which I didn't give a second thought to when I read the book, undoubtedly because I never gave a second thought to Prizzi's Honor the film), fine. I don't agree, but clearly there seems to something of a split opinion on that element of the book.

One can put enormous care into a book and still emerge with a hack job.

Also: Kellow comes off much better in that round table posted above, better than Camille Paglia, who by the second rambling monologue should have had someone sit on her face.

Didn't mind Camille that much because that's just the way she is and every once in while she would quote something very specific that was interesting and somebody else would pick up on that. Thought Toback repeated himself a lot but I guess he such a key figure in the PK story that it was worth it to hear his eyewitness viewpoint.

You're in luck! The rest of the book is 10,000,000 Nights at the Movies.
Frank Rich review says this part starts when she gets to the New Yorker
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/roaring-at-the-screen-with-pauline-kael.html?pagewanted=all

At this triumphant juncture, a reader should turn to Kael’s full New Yorker reviews rather than Kellow’s year-after-year summaries of them. His narrative bogs down in recaps of movie plots and the juvenile jockeying that attended the annual awards balloting by the New York film critics’ organizations. Mercifully, this chronicle finally gives way to a dishy, if depressing, account of Kael’s decline. If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

One can put enormous care into a book and still emerge with a hack job.

I suppose that's true, and if I thought Kellow were a bad writer, I'd agree. I think A Life in the Dark is very well written.

I go both ways with Paglia (I've still only watched half of the panel clip). Sometimes she makes me laugh (with her, not at her), other times I want to run for cover. I saw her speak about her poetry book a few years back. Ages ago, I had a film class with a girl who Paglia reminds me of so much. I remember she got drunk at a professor's party, didn't say a word for the next few weeks of class, and when she finally rejoined the discussion, it was (to coin a phrase) like a hurricane.

As a panel member she was ideal but a Quaalude wouldn't have helped.

*would've

If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

If critics like Rich would stop conflating the decline of American movies and the decline of Kael's prose, they'd stop writing drivel like this. I only notice a decline around 1990 and '91 when the paragraphs get choppier and her theses aren't fully realized (Kellow is partly right when he cites her Goodfellas review as an example).

Surely you would agree that you're in the minority in thinking that her '80s writing is the equal of her '70s (or earlier) writing.

I don't know! Like I wrote, we all agree Hollywood film wasn't as exciting in the eighties, but I can't remember anybody arguing that Kael's prose suffered a commensurate decline.

I guess I just have a hard time completely detaching the writing from the films themselves. I mean, obviously she didn't stop being a great writer--I'm not trying to say that. But for most of the eighties, I'm not as excited by her reviews of (say) Prizzi's Honor or Enemies: A Love Story or My Beautiful Laundrette as I am by those of Godfather II or Nashville or Invasion of the Body Snatchers because the films don't mean nearly as much to me. Now and again--Casualties of War would be the best example for me--we're back in sync. This is why comments of Kellow's like the Prizzi's Honor one above didn't bother me. I didn't even notice.

Saw Chinatown yesterday at the Lightbox, introduced by Adam Nayman, a local critic. The two endings--Towne's vs. Polanski's--came up, and reference was made to Kael's review. This is one time where I think she was completely wrong: her contention that Towne's ending, where Cross gets away with it but Evelyn leaves town, would have been better. Polanski's ending to me is perfect--and I agree with Nayman that it's not Polanski's "gargoyle grin" asserting itself, but rather a very anguished expression of his guilt over Sharon Tate's murder. (Supposedly he always felt guilty for not being there the night of the murder.)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/brushing-up-on-roman-polanskis-downbeat-endings/article2271445/print/

funnily enough, I vividly remember Kael writing approvingly that Jack's dopey hitman in Prizzi's Honor played like a cross between Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.

Of course, I prefer Prizzi's Honor to the first Godfather film.

thx for reminding me that I need to see Prizzi's Honor

Huston had to explain to a flummoxed Nicholson that it's a comedy.

Something else came up yesterday that I'd never thought about, and I've probably seen Chinatown 15-20 times: Huston saying to Nicholson "Are you sleeping with my daughter" at a time when in real life he was.

Huston supposedly said of P'sH, "Jack, everything you've done is infused with intelligence, and we can't have any of that here."