Book Review: Pauline Kael - For keeps

Wow, this is one thick book. 1300 pages of Pauline's movie reviews from 1960-1990.  3.8 lbs. If you want one volume of Pauline Kael's reviews, this it it. I  picked it up for $2, but - sadly - will return it.  I don't have have space for 3.8 lbs. books, I don't really care for.

So, why didn't I like it?  Well, several reasons:

1)  The book includes  thirty years of film, from 1960-1990 during which Kael published six books. The first one came out in 1965 and was called "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang". the last "Movie Love" was  published in 1991.  But  Kael and the editors made the mistake of including way too many films the 1980s & far too few from the 1960s - given that decline in Film quality over the 30 year period.  Accordingly, I had little interest in the last  50% of the book.

2) I used to love Pauline Kael - she seemed so smart and knowledgeable. But re-reading her reviews, I now wonder what all the fuss was about. Kael is incredibly WORDY - and she had trouble getting to the point. And I'm not going to repeat all of Renata Alder's criticism - but Kael's quirks and verbal tricks become more irritating - the more you read her.

3) Some of her reviews are simply awful. Her hysterical paeans to Nashville and Last Tango in Paris, her obsessive love affairs with Babs Streisand, and Cary Grant,  her trashing of Eastwood and championing of  Peckinpah, Kael was wildly inconsistent - over-praising certain actors/Directors while condemning others to the gallows with no more than a nod. Even worse, that's not connected to what's up on the screen - she's just playing favorites.

4) The selection of reviews - and their verbosity - is astoundingly.  One reason Kael was so beloved by fans was her ability to write intelligently and at length about all kinds of movies. But that being said, I'm not interested in reading 7 pages on The Right Stuff or 5 pages on Yentl.  Here are some more reviews Kael thought were "Keepers":

• La Chinoise - 6 pages
• The Trojan Women - 5 pages
• Billy Jack - 5 pages
• The Long Goodbye - 6 pages
• Walking Tall - 6 pages
• Distant Thunder - 4 pages
• King Kong - 5 pages
• Shoot the Moon - 6 pages.

Yikes! Does anyone remember these movies, let alone want to read 4-6 pages on them?

5) Kael has nothing interesting to say about the great Foreign Language films. Her reviews are intelligent, but passionless and painfully "correct"  - like a Mick Jagger putting on a Tux and playing Bach at Carnegie Hall. They're the dullest reviews in the book. Even worse, most of the movie reviews prior to 1970 are foreign film.

6) Although she never admitted it, she started going through the motions in the late-1970s.  The reviews get longer and longer. We get  less movie analysis, and more and more plot description or background on the film's production. Often Kael will go off on a tangent and write about a supporting actors career. But how else could any intelligent person write four pages on Mahogany, Saturday Night Fever,  Rambo or Back to the Future? 

7) Finally,  her reviews got worse after 1975 because she'd won. During the 60's she's championed "Trashy movies", vulgarity, profanity, and wide-open sexuality and violence. She was (despite her age)  the spunky upstart cocking her snoot at the pompous Crowther's and Stanley Kauffmann's of the film world.  Her reaction against the tired old cliches of the mid-1960's resulted in some of her best writing. But after 1975, she was rebel without a cause. Hollywood was making nothing but "Trashy movies".  But to Kael, they were the wrong kind of "trash".  The "new freedom" hadn't resulted in better movies - just more sex and violence. So, by the mid-1980s she started to sound like the Grande Dame of the Cinema, which wasn't her forte. Its the old cliche, almost every young revolutionary, turns into a tired old man.