For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies
by Pauline Kael
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A collection of movie reviews done over the last thirty years by Pauline Kael.Tags
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Member Reviews
My all-time favourite film reviewer. About 1300 pages of fun opinionated pyrotechnics.
Her reviews sometimes have a stream-of-consciousness quality. Not only do we get her thoughts at the typewriter after the screening, but her mood as she walked in the theatre and sat down. Reviewing was not adhering to some objective standard of quality, it was personal.
Anyone that has ever engaged with “the arts” knows that objectivity is a farce, there is too much baggage in us for that. And anyone can write from that position, I suppose, but Pauline Kael had dynamite style for the ages.
I adore her, she's the One!
Her reviews sometimes have a stream-of-consciousness quality. Not only do we get her thoughts at the typewriter after the screening, but her mood as she walked in the theatre and sat down. Reviewing was not adhering to some objective standard of quality, it was personal.
Anyone that has ever engaged with “the arts” knows that objectivity is a farce, there is too much baggage in us for that. And anyone can write from that position, I suppose, but Pauline Kael had dynamite style for the ages.
I adore her, she's the One!
So you like movies, eh? Give this a shot. A cornucopia and compendium of film reviews and criticism by the eminent New Yorker film reviewer, Pauline Kael. I don't always agree with her opinions, but every review radiates with her enthusiasm and knowledge for the medium. I haven't read all the reviews, but as a resource it is indispensable. Highly recommended.
The best of the Kael books, I think, this collection of essays draws upon: I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), Going Steady (1970), The Citizen Kane Book (1973), Deeper into Movies (1973), Reeling (1976), When the Lights Go Down (1980), Taking It All In (1984), State of the Art (1985), Hooked (1989), and Movie Love (1991).
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ThingScore 100
Many people with whom I have argued about Kael have said, "Okay, she's a good writer. But her opinions about movies . . ." Are perverse. Or quirky. No, they aren't. Try watching Love in the Afternoon, with Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn. The newspaper listings or your standard movie-on-TV guide will probably pronounce it a classic. But if you are like me, when you watch it you think, Jeez, show more this is a maundering old guy somehow assumed to be attractive to this beautiful gamine. So you pick up 5001 Nights and you read, "Gary Cooper, looking as if he knows how unappealing he is in the role . . ."
For Keeps is not such a handy reference. It's one of the thickest one-volume compendiums (two and eleven-sixteenths inches) of anybody's work I've seen. It's shaped like something you might want to pull off the shelf and read aloud from with the whole family gathered around, but you'd need to have a family that is receptive, all together, to sentiments like "a little nose-thumbing isn't enough . . . we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery." The publisher talked her out of calling it The Bedside Pauline Kael, but bed is a good place for it--I have myself more than once drifted off to dreamland savoring a passage like (on Vanessa Redgrave) "she can be majestic more fluidly than anyone else (and there's more of her to uncoil)." show less
For Keeps is not such a handy reference. It's one of the thickest one-volume compendiums (two and eleven-sixteenths inches) of anybody's work I've seen. It's shaped like something you might want to pull off the shelf and read aloud from with the whole family gathered around, but you'd need to have a family that is receptive, all together, to sentiments like "a little nose-thumbing isn't enough . . . we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery." The publisher talked her out of calling it The Bedside Pauline Kael, but bed is a good place for it--I have myself more than once drifted off to dreamland savoring a passage like (on Vanessa Redgrave) "she can be majestic more fluidly than anyone else (and there's more of her to uncoil)." show less
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Lists
Film
114 works; 1 member
Author Information
41+ Works 2,920 Members
Awards and Honors
Common Knowledge
- First words
- (Introduction) I’ve been lucky; I wrote about movies during a great period, and I wrote about them for a great readership, at The New Yorker.
As a schoolgirl, my suspiciousness about those who attack American "materialism” was first aroused by the refugees from Hitler who so often contrasted their “culture” with our “vulgar materialism” when I discovered ... (show all)that their “culture” consisted of their having had servants in Europe, and a swooning acquaintance with the poems of Rilke, the novels of Stefan Zweig and Lion Feuchtwanger, the music of Mahler and Bruckner. - Quotations
- In the forties, the talented merged with the untalented and became almost indistinguishable from them, and the mediocre have been writing movies ever since. When the good writers tried to regain their self-respect by becoming... (show all) political activists in the Stalinist style, it was calamitous to talent; the Algonquin group’s own style was lost as their voice blended into the preachy, self-righteous chorus.
The comedy writers who had laughed at cant now learned to write it and were rehabilitated as useful citizens of the community of mediocrity. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)And at the same time that he’s telling us how decadent we are he’s making this overscaled, sensuous, sumptuous fantasy that looks as if it’s about Lawrence of Arabia’s sex life.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 791.4375 — Arts & recreation Recreation, sports, and performing arts Public performances Motion pictures, radio, television, podcasting Motion pictures Films; screenplays Two or more films
- LCC
- PN1995 .K225 — Language and Literature Literature (General) Literature (General) Drama Motion pictures
- BISAC
Statistics
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- 323
- Popularity
- 98,028
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (4.42)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
- ASINs
- 1
