Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Rating:
Summary: briefest statement imaginable for the basic appeal of movies
Review: This is Pauline Kael's second book of film reviews, covering 1965- 1967, when she was freelancing and yet to be attached to The New Yorker magazine. It also includes notes on 280 movies capsule reviews which predates her later 5001 Notes at the Movies companion. On the title of the book, Kael says she it on an Italian poster and is perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. "This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this". In this volume her raves include a 17 page study of Bonnie and Clyde, Persona, Falstaff, Band of Outsiders, Masculine Feminine, Laurence Olivier as Othello, and Boudou Saved from Drowning though made in France in 1931 was only released in the United States in 1967. Her pans Blow-Up, Madame X, Hawaii, Darling, Ship of Fools, and her infamous review of The Sound of Music which lost her a job. She also includes essays on The Creative Business, Godard and the Movie Brutalists, an exhaustive The Making of The Group covering 33 pages, suggested movies for children, and studies of the careers of Brando, Orson Welles and Stanley Kramer. A few amusing quotes. After the first few minutes of Grand Prix, my companion said Now you know what it's like to be run over. You don't go to this movie, it comes after you. Pasolini's The Gospel According to st Matthew was so static that I could hardly wait for that loathsome prissy young man to get crucified. In The Bible God couldn't have had much much of a sense of humour if he went to the trouble of destroying the posing prancing faggots of Sodom. And, the process shots in Fantastic Voyage are so clumsliy mated with the figures that the actors look as if a child has cut them out with blunt scissors.