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Bezig met laden... Taking It All indoor Pauline Kael
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 Kael's devotion to her chosen art form has been a life-long affair ("Going Steady" was the title she gave, aptly enough, to a previous collection of reviews), and her most precious quality as a critic is an inexhaustible love. One of the things she regularly loses at the movies is her heart. She's at her most admirable when celebrating films that delight in the cinema as ecstatically as she does herself - arguing that Abel Gance's "real subject" is his "love of the medium itself," with Napoleon as a symbol for the all- conquering, universalistic art of the future; justifying the dippy pastiche of "Diva" because it revels in "the richness you can only get from movies" and "the joy of making them." That joy, as Kael communicates it, is a tinglingly erotic one. The movie screen is a gymnasium where limber, beloved bodies leap or langorously stretch. The female athletes of "Personal Best" are dancing embodiments of this vitality, which is the energy of film: "you can really learn something essential about girls," Kael notes, "by looking at their thighs." Treating movies as the arena for an Olympiad of desire, Kael is wonderfully eloquent about the splendid animals who cavort there - about Paul Newman's lean, cocky quickness in "Absence of Malice," which she reads as moral economy and mental trimness, or the "lewd gusto" of Ben Gazzara in "Tales of Ordinary Madness." One approaches a seventh large collection of Pauline Kael movie reviews with more than a little deja-vu non-enthusiasm--only to find that the Kael virtues are as infectious as ever, that her energy remains awesome, that her film criticism continues to stand up to time better than anyone else's. Admittedly, some of the Kael drawbacks also show no sign of fading: a weakness for a certain brand of showy titillation (Diva, Blow Out, Personal Best); excessive subjectivity about certain actresses (the devotion to Streisand, the antipathy towards Streep); excessive loyalty to certain directors; a tendency to be far more exuberant when damning (often comically) than praising. But the most familiar cavil against Kael's work--that the voluptuous length and detail of the reviews is self-indulgent--seems more wrongheaded than ever in this collection, where every word counts and economical phrasings abound. (""Best Friends is a Velveeta comedy. . . Seeing Raiders is like being put through a Cuisinart"" . . .And Nine to Five is ""strong-arm whimsy."") Onderdeel van de reeks(en)
From the Blurb: Taking It All In is the seventh collection of Pauline Kael's movie reviews, and it maintains the high standard she set for herself almost twenty years ago in I Lost it at the Movies and has held to in each of its memorable successors: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper into Movies, Reeling, and When the Lights Go Down. From its title, which sums up in a phrase the Kael way of seeing and writing about movies, to its concluding pieces, a sympathetic and evocative consideration of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, this newest volume is potent evidence of Pauline Kael's enthusiasm, discrimination, wit, and famous style. Taking It All In, following the weekly pattern of The New Yorker where all the pieces first appeared, runs from June 1980 to June 1983, and brings to life some 150 films-The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Mommie Dearest, Reds, Tootsie, The Stunt Man, Gandhi, Sophie's Choice, Diva, Diner, Return of the Jedi. Very early in the book there is a piece entitled "Why Are Movies So Bad?"; it provides a devastating answer. Yet, as Kael is quick to point out, good movies are still being made. She herself is adept at discovering them, and when she does, she writes about them with a sense of celebration. Taking It All In takes its proper place alongside Pauline Kael's other collections. Together the seven volumes represent an achievement without parallel in movie criticism-a record of two decades of regular movie-going, kept by a critic of exceptional sensibility and knowledge. The voice, though often imitated, remains inimitable; the pleasure for the reader, encountering it again, remains unconfined. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)791.43The arts Recreational and performing arts Public performances Film, Radio, and Television FilmLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.75)
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And then there's the Kael style, the deceptively relaxed conversational prose that can kneecap a film with a casual turn of phrase. Describing the pokey dialogue of The Shining, she writes that "you could drop stones into a river and watch the ripples between the words." The catatonic performances of Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon remind her of "looking into a fishbowl and waiting for guppies to mate." And "Rich and Famous features those two great underpopulated bodies Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen."