Quote of the Day (Pauline Kael, on ‘The Worst Thing About Movie-Making’)

"The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.”―American film critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Film Writings, 1965-1967 (1968)

From her longtime perch at The New Yorker, Pauline Kael— born 100 years ago today in Petaluma, Calif.—delivered one cheeky observation after another, on American film and, like here, on life. 

From the first review that won her widespread notice, on Bonnie and Clyde, she rolled out the welcome mat for a new generation of filmmakers that, like her, were all about overturning convention. 

Not for Kael the solemn biopics and message movies that were long Oscar-bait. She championed films by renegades, like Robert Altman’s Nashville, or directors who had fun with genres, such as Warren Beatty, George Lucas, and Brian de Palma. She attracted her own coterie of devoted readers—“Paulettes,” as David Edelstein recalled for New York Magazine.

Style pulsated throughout both the movies she loved and her own reviews. Sometimes she yielded to the temptation not merely to be witty but snarky. And when she didn’t divide readers, she could disappoint them (as when she appropriated as her own much of the research a UCLA assistant professor for her takedown of Orson Welles, Raising Kane).

But like Glenn Close’s mad seductress of Fatal Attraction (a movie she loathed for its “hostile version of feminism”), she would not be ignored.