For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies

Rating:
Summary: The Pale Muse with the discerning eye and the sharp tongue
Review: Pauline Kael and movie criticism was at its height when American and foreign movies were at their height. The two go hand in hand. The high quality of the movies of the time made for inspired debate. But even given the fortunate circumstance to be writing at such a time she still stands out because she brings to her criticism not just an appreciation of film but an appreciation of art in all its forms. She is one of the few critics who can discuss Lolita or Women in Love or Sheltering Sky or Unbearable Lightness of Being as both literary work and film. She never really limits herself to being an expert on film, she always seems to be coming from some other expertise (like literature) and so she brings an authority and perhaps legitamacy to film criticism by talking about films in a way usually reserved for books. She believes more than anything else in the potential for film to be great, perhaps as great as literature, and I think her reviews are attempts to do her part in lifting the art form. Her belief in Bertolucci as one of films geniuses for instance is undiminished by the fact that she doesn't seem to like many of his films(Last Tango excepted). She is at her best when reviewing a great film like Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or Truffaut's Story of Adele H. at which time one can only sit back and listen as she is nothing short of inspired, ecstastic, and it is infectious. It is dissappointing that film never achieved the status she had in mind for it and she was dissappointed at the direction the art form went. her later reviews are still good but really the spark was gone by 75 or 76. She presided over what might be films greatest period(67-75). While the great directors were producing their best work she was the one who understood them first, so she will always be equated with that period, not merely a critic but a champion of an art form.