5001 Nights at the Movies

As someone who is just beginning to explore the classics, I love being able to see what Pauline Kael thought about many of the most important movies of our time. Since I often agree with her, it helps me save time and money in determining which movies I want to rent (and if not available to rent, buy). All movie titles are in alphabetical order, and there is an index in the back which contains film titles, directors, actors, etc.However, the capsule reviews can occasionally be misleading. From the capsules, I thought Pauline liked (or at least didn't dislike) "8 1/2" by Fellini and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" by Resnais. But in her book "I Lost It At The Movies", the full reviews are a pretty harsh pan.I also wish that she had a "Best Movies" list. Nevertheless, still a very useful (but thick) book.

Since this book first came out in the mid 1980s I have gone through no less than four well-thumbed, well-handled editions that have fallen apart from overuse. This is a compendium of all Pauline Kael's shorter reviews from the front of THE NEW YORKER, and it has perhaps given me more pleasure than any other book in my life. By no means exhaustive (Kael even made a gesture towards its ultimate incompleteness by neglecting to comment directly on GONE WITH THE WIND and THE WIZARD OF OZ), the book covers more films than you would imagine, and its always fun to see what Kael saw and what she thought about it. Her aesthetic--simultaneously magisterial and informal, Olympian and fun-loving--has been discussed, critiqued, and even criticized to death; yet there is no getting around the fact that she is not only smarter than most other movie critics but also funnier. Her reviews of works as disparate as "The White Cliffs of Dover," "The Sound of Music," and the 1951 "Show Boat," have given me joy for years. Buy this, and see if you don't have to buy yourself another copy when the first one wears out.

Gosh... Movie reviewers can certainly offend easily. I agree with Pauline Kael's assessments roughly 50% of the time, but I still love reading her. She is always intelligent (even when she is wrong wrong wrong) --- and what a great writer! She manages to be "mean" over and over again without exactly being mean-spirited. And why on earth is a movie reviewer not supposed to have political opinions? I never understand this peculiarly American criticism. Can you review "Triumph of the Will" or "Rambo" or "La Chinoise" without venturing into the realm of politics? Probably, but why would you want to? I don't think the type of person who makes this criticism is really looking for a dry, studied dissection of film technique, but perhaps I'm wrong. Anyway, she's no more "political" than any other worthwhile reviewer I can think of. This book is full of buried treasures --- quite a few films in it that I had never even heard of before. It's just a darned entertaining read, too. Every few pages, there is a laugh-out-loud funny turn of phrase. Usually a pretty mean turn of phrase but it's hard to have harsh feelings towards someone who writes, for example, in her review of "Funny Lady", "The moviemakers weren't just going to make a sequel to 'Funny Girl'---they were going to kill us." Or, in a review of "The Last Tycoon", "...so enervated, it's like a vampire movie after the vampires have left."

Pauline Kael is fascinating to read, providing you know that you won't necessarily agree with her. In fact, you'll probably become quite irritated with her blindness to the greatness of a film. But Kael is (was) a fantastic reviewer of film, because she never compromises her opinion, she makes you think, and most of all, she obviously loves movies. I say that she makes you think because when she trashes a movie that you may love, ("Star Wars," "2001: A Space Odyssey") you will start coming up with arguments to her points yourself. Thus, she does what any great critic should do: challenge your opinion of a film, and make you gain a new perspective of what made that film great or terrible. Furthermore, Kael was one of the first major critics to do this. I also said that Kael obviously loved movies. This really comes across when she gives a film a good review. Her praise is, to say the least, glowing. If she thinks that a film is brilliant, she seems almost giddy in her writing. In short, Pauline Kael possesses all the qualities of a great reviewer.

Having read Kael's work for years, I find untenable the assertion that she was favored European "art" film over American cinema. Any perusal of her writings will indicate that she lauded innovative American filmmaking - Scorsese ("Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver"), Coppola ("Godfather I" and "Godfather II"), Altman ("MASH", "McCabe", "Nashville", etc.) and was a discerning and forthright critic of "art" cinema - she does not exactly heap praise on Kubrick, she's rather reserved about Bergman (with some notable exceptions), doesn't have much use for Truffaut between "Jules et Jim" and "Adele H.", adored Antonioni's "L'Avenntura" but didn't like his other work (especially "Blow-Up"), disliked Fellini's carny-collages, and railied against the pretentious art-house cinema mind games of Resnais's "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbrad." While she does indeed praise many foreign films - and this alone seems enough to make her a snob in some people's eyes - one comes away from her works of directors she liked (Scorsese's 1980s films, Altman's 1980's films, Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder", Bunuel's "The Milky Way") and praised the works of directors she didn't (Alan Parker's "Shoot the Moon"). Granted, she was often critical of popular favorities (and some of my favorities, too - like "Goodfellas", "Wings of Desire", "Raiders of the Lost Ark") but a critic who kowtows to popular sentiment rather than exercises her own judgement isn't a critic but a publicist.It's ironic that Kael spent most of her life criticizing those "snobs" (like Dwight MacDonald) who refused to acknowledge film as a popular art form - that there could be something aesthetic in a mass art form - and now, people accuse her of the same sort of arrogance. In truth, she was one of the most lucid and analytical film critics of her time. When she dug into a film's themes, a director's motives, an actor's performance, or a cinematographer's color scheme, she could make any subject complusively readable. And she performed the critics' most important function (which is not panning, despite what people may think) -- she helped one see elements and ideas in films that were frequently overlooked or taken for granted and she helped you to see them in new ways. You may have disagreed with her but you walked away from reading her work a sharper film viewer than before. The only flaw with a collection like "5000 Nights" is that all you get are summaries, not the complete reviews, so you can't get a full appreciation of her essayistic skills. For that reason, this book should be complemented with "For Keeps" to round out not only the breadth but depth of her writings