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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Raising Kael, or, "I Lost It On The Internet": Part II

So… where was Pauline Kael this week? Over at NY Times blogs. love was lavished by Stanley Fish on her slavering over Charlton Heston’s work of body: “When you saw him it was all too easy to agree with Pauline Kael’s summary assessment: ‘With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a god-like hero; built for strength, he is an archetype of what makes Americans win.’” But in Saskatchewan, crickets lose, as a conservative blogger at the Western Standard tinycricket.gif spins a too-familiar canard: ” I believe that Obama is going to lose, that he is going to lose big, and that the media is going to miss it – possibly until the very last moment due to the Pauline Kael syndrome (“I can’t believe it! I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon”). When it’s over, they’ll blame it on American racism.” Doug Moe at Wisconsin State Journal adds Kael’s contrast of Heston and Paul Sorvino: “Sorvino’s character in Slow Dancing in the Big City is a daily newspaper columnist. Pauline Kael noted in her New Yorker review: ‘He’s a loud, sad-sack oaf, with an idiot smile—a patsy.’ It’s enough to make a daily columnist want to fall on his sword.” At Popmatters, Kael is invoked as a writer confesses about not being invited to a screening other writers were: “With an unlimited access to information, a community that’s passionate about its viewpoint, the ability to achieve rapid (if also restrictive) consensus, and an outright capacity to leave the traditional media in the dust, [the internet] should be the [belwether] for a new wave of criticism. Unfortunately, the fanboy tends to take over, allowing unrealistic expectations and a blinkered devotion to one’s own insights to win out. Now, some might say the same about Pauline Kael, or Roger Ebert. After all, film reviewing is founded in personal judgment more than any other factor.” memoires de fumee_65.jpgAt Rotten Tomatoes’ Meet The Critic, MSNBC’s Georgia-based Alonso Duralde cites influences: “I grew up obsessed with movies, and I devoured film criticism, from Eleanor Ringel in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to Roger Ebert and Vito Russo and Pauline Kael and David Ansen and anyone else I could get my mitts on.” Boston Globe honors their Pulitzer-winner Mark Feeney, writing that “Globe arts editor Scott Heller said Feeney is animated by what the late critic Pauline Kael once called a “belief in the audience.” “Mark takes this to heart in every piece he writes,” Has it only been a week since Patrick Goldstein invoked his child to describe why he thinks critics are no longer relevant? He pulls Pauline from the grave for his sins: “hen I was growing up, eager to write about the arts, it was just as important to read Pauline Kael, Frank Rich and Lester Bangs as it was to see a Robert Altman film, a David Mamet play or listen to the latest Elvis Costello album. Critics gave art its context, explained its meaning and guided us to new discoveries.” Now, he surveys college classes to further devalue his image of colleagues in the field. David Edelstein, in New York magazine’s 40th anniversary number, pish-toshes together an overview of New York filmmaking for the past four decades: “Pauline Kael wrote that on-location shooting had ushered in a new age of “nightmare realism,” with New York as “Horror City.” [The French Connection was Exhibit A: trash, horns, gore, Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle slapping suspects around, and a chase scene yet to be equaled for suspense and public endangerment.” Taking up Edelstein, The Reeler, however does not sup at the grave of Great Barrington, supplementing his observation that “[M]ass-market entries like Enchanted, I Am Legend and the upcoming Sex and the City movie are far more emphatic evocations of the real post-9/11 New York: a municipally authorized spectrum of urban fantasy… It’s what makes the metaphor of something like Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night—with its bomb-packing outsider prowling tourist-heavy Times Square—so inaccessible yet utterly essential. It is as if to say, “Your imagination is not your own.” Chirp.


Bonus, from Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger, Ms. Kael speaks!

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon