Pauline Kael

[Keebleman]

She would have been 100 today.  She is one of the best examples of the positive function of a critic: her work makes you go back to the film with a deeper appreciation of it.

[chveik]

horrible woman. lousy writer. pretty much always wrong.

[Shit Good Nose]

Don't forget the almost certain fact that, particularly in her later years, she didn't even watch half the films she was reviewing, and also how she unfairly used her work to air personal grievances and launch barbed attacks on actors, directors and writers she didn't like personally.

Still, important for being the one that made critics important and to be taken seriously as journalists.  Which is good or bad, depending on who you ask.

[Sin Agog]

Only read a couple of things by her, but back in my commentary-listening days her name was scornfully dropped by a ridiculous number of bitter filmmakers. I am strangely interested in the cultural power wielded by this lineage of tough, conservative female columnists going back to Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons (why hasn't Scandal done a series on these two yet?).  Lotte Eisner seems like one of the genuinely decent Iron Fraulein film critics.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

she was much better at writing broader appreciation essays than she was at reviewing individual films

[sevendaughters]

Really enjoy her writing and find her general worldview a bit inscrutable and tough to pin down, like she'd leap out of the dark and knife something you'd expect her to like hard in the ribs.

Not as good as Dilys Powell though.

[Shit Good Nose]

Safe to say that she'd be swiftly #CANCELLED if she was around today.

[Monsieur Verdoux]

i mean almost every culturally prominent figure in the 70s would be

[Shit Good Nose]

i mean almost every culturally prominent figure in the 70s would be

True.  Take that right up to about 2009 too.

[kngen]

This New York is a voluptuous enemy. The street vapors become ghostly; Sport the pimp romancing his baby whore leads her in a hypnotic dance; the porno theatres are like mortuaries; the congested traffic is macabre. And this Hell is always in movement.

She fucking nailed that one, you have to say. At her best she was like a really smart friend explaining to you why you liked the films you did, but never patronising you.

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

She was no Paul Ross.

[zomgmouse]

if you don't like something she doesn't like it's really fun to read what she doesn't like about it and if you do like something she doesn't like then it's interesting to read why and maybe get a new perspective or just be a little irritated but in any case she wrote really fantastic stuff and i like her

[Shit Good Nose]

if you don't like something she doesn't like it's really fun to read what she doesn't like about it and if you do like something she doesn't like then it's interesting to read why and maybe get a new perspective

Assuming she did actually watch what you disagreed on, of course.

[Puce Moment]

Kael or Vids? Hard to come down on one side.

[McChesney Duntz]

Assuming she did actually watch what you disagreed on, of course.

Okay, you keep saying this - do you have any evidence to back this up?

[Shit Good Nose]

Okay, you keep saying this - do you have any evidence to back this up?

I'm not sure if mentioning it twice constitutes as "keep saying it", but there are numerous reviews of hers available in the New Yorker archive where it's blatantly obvious she either didn't finish watching the film, or didn't bother watching it at all.  Some have speculated that this was possibly a side effect of her Parkinson's, particularly as it tended to happen more in her later life, but there's quite a famous one from earlier in her career where the director of whichever film it was (I can't remember off the top of my head as I read about it years ago - it may have been in one of Peter Biskind's books and it may have been Shoah) called her out in the print press and highlighted specific criticisms she made for things that weren't even scripted, let alone shot and included in the finished film.

There are also people that have said that some of her reviews were based on pre-shooting scripts - a critic's privelige and a way for her to beat her rivals to the punch - and that she never saw the finished product.  She certainly based her review of Altman's Nashville on dailies that she'd seen long before he'd finished shooting it, but that was a ninja move to make sure the studio didn't cut it and it also worked in the film's favour in that particular instance.

But there's ample coverage of her more "cut-throat" shenanigans, some of which are covered in her own books.

You have to remember this was LONG before the internet, streaming, forums, blogging etc, so general Joe Public were a lot less savvy about provenance.  I'm sure she's not the only pre-internet critic who did "drive by" reviews, but hers seemed particularly personally scathing more so than others.

[McChesney Duntz]

I'm not sure if mentioning it twice constitutes as "keep saying it"

Fair enough.

but there are numerous reviews of hers available in the New Yorker archive where it's blatantly obvious she either didn't finish watching the film, or didn't bother watching it at all. 

Do you have specific reviews in mind?

[Monsieur Verdoux]

forgot that Paul Schrader was part of her cult

[McChesney Duntz]

forgot that Paul Schrader was part of her cult

And she was brutal towards a lot of his work as a director, to his eternal chagrin. Which proves I know not what - doesn't disprove the idea of her personal disdain for directors or actors resulting in negative assessments of their work, but there's some sort of integrity in her not letting her actual friendships cloud her judgement in the other direction. Though I know that Schrader, at least at first, definitely took it personally.

[Shit Good Nose]

Fair enough.
Do you have specific reviews in mind?

Off the top of my head no because I'm going back some years, but they're there.  I know George Roy Hill thought she was full of bullshit (and his spat with her in the 70s is very well documented) and, further, a very dangerous person to be in the company of.  It's also a well known fact that she was usually shit-faced toward the end of her screening day, which almost guarantees that any reviews for films she saw then were suspect.

[Keebleman]

Another aspect of Kael which is rarely commented on is how she ignored the generation gap, which was far more significant in the 60s, 70s and early 80s than it is now.  She would write about Mick Jagger, Richard Pryor and even David Byrne - all of them at least 20 years younger than her - in a way that completely accepted their styles and the content of their work as valid (not to mention all the key directors of the era in which she wrote; even Lumet and Altman were significantly younger than her).  This is not to say that she approved of them necessarily, but there is no sense in her writing of a straining to understand, or of feeling cut adrift.  I know that if I had been born in 1919 and had to write about Jagger etc, the best I could have done would have been a polite bafflement.