"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.
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