Cool: Miami Vice

[With Public Enemies about to drop, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

Michael Mann’s cinematic rendering of Miami Vice has several elements that fans of the original TV series will recognize. Namely: exotic locales, shiny sports cars, sharp suits, a white guy named Sonny Crockett and a black guy named Ricardo Tubbs. Beyond those bare necessities, though, there is little that relates this midnight blue crooner to the pastel pop artist that was the 1980s TV sensation.

For someone like me, always partial to Magnum, P.I., that’s no big deal. But I suspect that devotees of the small-screen crime show that canonized the cool of a 10 o’clock shadow, sockless shoe-wearing and stereo TV are going to leave the theater confused, if not disappointed. Because what’s the point of an adaptation if it hardly resembles its source material? In Miami Vice the movie, Mann, who was one of the TV show’s executive producers, has crafted a mostly flat rather than flashy drama in which Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas couldn’t even pass for extras.

The only things binding this movie to its inspiration are its title and character names. Even then the links are tenuous. I’ve always thought of the detective team as “Crockett and Tubbs,” yet I’m not sure the latter’s surname ever gets mentioned, probably because there seems to be so little to talk about. Colin Ferrell’s Sonny and Jamie Foxx’s Ricardo chatter as infrequently as an old married couple. And while they exude a too-cool-to-be-bothered suaveness, they are less cocksure than comatose. By comparison, James Bond’s “shaken not stirred” persona vibrates like a blender.

It’s as if Mann thinks himself too serious a filmmaker to embrace his more flamboyant roots. This doesn’t taste like 1980s primetime; it’s Heat Lite, with Ricardo stuck in the passenger’s seat and Sonny doing Neil McCauley flip-flops between a devotion to duty and an addiction to love. Gong Li brings intrigue as the sexy Isabella, the object of Sonny’s affection, but as the right-hand woman of a drug lord whose operation Sonny and Ricardo are trying to infiltrate, Isabella is as unavailable as she is stand-offish.

Thus the only thing more bizarre than Sonny’s out-of-nowhere invitation for mojitos is Isabella’s quick acceptance. Still, their far-fetched romance is the only part of the story with an emotional pulse. Sequestered in a Cuban bungalow, Sonny and Isabella turn up the heat and make us wish their dream could be our reality. But soon it’s back to the mainland for more confusing name-dropping in a punch-soft plot that never quite justifies its complexity.

Beyond the Cuba episode and some moody cityscapes, Miami Vice finds excellence only in its climactic shootout, which is vintage Mann: the machineguns are familiar, but the bullet caliber seems to be tripled as we rock with the impact of each slug. During the showdown I decided that Mann would be perfect to helm a John Wilkes Booth biopic, as he’d be sure to capture the bomb-like historical reverberations of the assassin’s tiny Derringer. Alas, in Miami Vice the bullets get lost in the visual noise of a digital ballad that has passionate aims but underwhelming results.


Addendum: I’m about to go on a Mann binge, and Miami Vice is the film I’m most looking forward to seeing again. Though my first reaction to Heat was much stronger, it took a few more viewings to see all that it has to offer. Perhaps there’s more depth to Miami Vice than I took away the first time. We’ll see.

2010 Oscars: More Films, Less Fun

Newsflash: The purpose of the Academy Awards isn’t to honor achievement in filmmaking. The purpose of the Academy Awards is to market the movie industry. If you didn’t know that already, you certainly must know it now, a day after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced that next year, and for the foreseeable future, there will be 10 films nominated for Best Picture instead of the (recently) traditional five. The purpose of this increase isn’t to decorate five more films, of course, because in a sense all the AMPAS has done is expand the list of Oscar night also-rans. The goal, without question, is to make five more films – and the star-studded live TV event that pimps them – more profitable.

Do I sound jaded? I don’t think I am. Because even though the AMPAS seems to be taking an embarrassing step toward the MTV mentality that celebrates films for their teen-biased performance at the box office, at the same time the Academy also is expanding the opportunities for small, controversial, abstract, and otherwise box-office-challenged films to reach a larger audience, and the latter might be worth the pains of the former, because, ideally, the latter might eventually influence the former. See, something like the big-budget Transformers 2 doesn’t need an Oscar nomination for the average moviegoer to be convinced that it’s a “must-see” film, but something like Two Lovers does. The difference between your 8-movies-a-year coworker having already seen The Reader over Revolutionary Road comes down to the fact that one of those films earned multiple major Oscar nods (a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actress win for Kate Winslet) and the other one didn’t. If that same 8-movies-a-year coworker could be convinced to see five more movies each year, he/she might realize that Frost/Nixon isn’t a top-5 picture of any year. Simply put: the more movies the average moviegoer sees, the greater the chance that he/she discovers a truly great film. In that respect, both sides seem to profit from the expansion of the nominee pool. But there is a significant downside.

By adding five films to the Best Picture slate, the Academy has sucked some of the fun out of Oscar season by eliminating the very thing that makes it interesting: controversy. For example, had the AMPAS expanded the Best Picture pool a year ago, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight almost certainly would have received the Oscar nomination that its fanboys so desperately craved. But what would that nomination have been worth? What does it mean to be one of the 10 best pictures of the year? The 2009 Oscars were four months ago, but already I’ve forgotten the five Best Picture nominees. There was Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and … and … Doubt? No, Doubt dominated the acting categories. So what was the fifth film? I’ll look it up in a bit. For the moment it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I can easily name five films that were considered unfairly “snubbed” in the last Oscar race: The Dark Knight, Gran Torino, Revolutionary Road , WALL-E and The Wrestler.

Because the Academy Awards have more in common with a political campaign than Olympic competition, there is power in controversy. In sports terms, the Oscar race better resembles college football’s BCS format than college basketball’s March Madness tournament. Though an Oscar nomination always raises a film’s profile in the short term, what often elevates a film to celebrated long-term greatness is the debate stirred up by the Academy’s dismissal. Fanboys might still be pissed that The Dark Knight didn’t get the validation of a Best Picture nomination, but as a result its fans get to spend the rest of time arguing that their favorite film got screwed, that the system didn’t support it, that at worst The Dark Knight was the sixth-best film of the year in the eyes of people who were prejudiced against it in the first place, which means it has to be awesome just to be in the conversation.

People will remember The Dark Knight in part because of its Oscar outsider status. Had it been included in a pool of 10 nominees, The Dark Knight might have become as forgettable as … as … as that fifth nominee from last year that still isn’t coming to me. Even worse, the validation that The Dark Knight fanboys hoped to receive through the Academy’s reluctant recognition of the superhero genre could have been spoiled with a 10-picture slate if the Academy also nominated 2008’s other wildly popular comic book movie, Iron Man. If that had happened, The Dark Knight wouldn’t have looked so special after all.

The Oscars will still be fun, of course, and they’ll still inspire debate, and maybe these extra nominations will allow the Academy to be more daring while also appeasing the mostly naïve masses. Maybe it will be a net gain. But it’s always been exciting to discover which five films would get a chance to compete for the big prize. After the announcement, it’s always been fun wondering which film just missed the cut and debating why. At the end of 2009 and in the initial weeks of 2010, there won’t be the same joy in Movieville. When there are 10 films competing for one statuette, the word snubbed no longer applies. That argument is now obsolete. Until recently, the Best Picture nomination system created lovable losers. Now, if you’re not a Best Picture nominee, you’re just a loser.

Pauline Kael Week

Posting for Pauline Kael Week concludes today with one bonus entry, but the discussions are ongoing. Thanks to everyone who has participated thus far. The rest of you, please don't be afraid to jump in; just read and react!

Bonus
Paulinepourri
Scrumptious Kael morsels covering 14 films. Feel free to contribute some of your own favorite morsels in the comments section.

Day 5
Kael on Criticism
In honor of her birthday. If you have broad thoughts about Kael's criticism, or memories you'd like to share, please leave them in the comments section here.

Kael on Cult Cinema
Touches on Easy Rider, Midnight Cowbowy, Alice's Restaurant and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in this snapshot of Kaels view of cinema closing out the 60s.

Day 4
Kael on Cinema Trash - Part I (Art)
"There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art."

Kael on Cinema Trash - Part II (Technique)
"Technique is hardly worth talking about unless it’s used for something worth doing; that’s why most of the theorizing about the new art of television commercials is such nonsense."

Kael on Cinema Trash - Part III (Enjoyment)
"We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art."

Kael on Cinema Trash - Part IV (Worthwhile)
"A nutty Puritanism still flourishes in the arts, not just in the schoolteachers’ approach of wanting art to be “worthwhile,” but in the higher reaches of the audience life with those ideologues who denounce us for enjoying trash as if this enjoyment took us away from the really disturbing, angry new art of our time and somehow destroyed us."

Day 3
Kael on Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man
A takedown of stunt acting.

The Slow Fade-Out of Pauline Kael
by Doug Bonner of Boiling Sand

Day 2
Kael on Movies on Television
Has TV negatively affected the natural selection of cinematic touchstones?

Day 1
Kael on Violence in Cinema
A review of A Clockwork Orange provides the opportunity to discuss violence in cinema.

Kael on Epics
Kael compares John Huston to David Lean.

Paulinepourri

[To close out postings for Pauline Kael Week (consider the discussions ongoing), here are some scrumptious Kael morsels.]

Full reviews of the following films can be found in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies.


Last Tango in Paris
This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies. They’ll argue about how it was intended, as they argue again now about The Dance of Death. It is a movie you can’t get out of your system, and I think it will make some people very angry and disgust others. I don’t believe that there’s anyone whose feelings can be totally resolved about the sex scenes and the social attitudes in this film.

The Godfather – Part II
Throughout the three hours and twenty minutes of Part II, there are so many moments of epiphany – mysterious, reverberant images, such as the small Vito singing in his cell – that one scarcely has the emotional resources to deal with the experience of this film. Twice, I almost cried out at acts of violence that De Niro’s Vito committed. I didn’t look away from the images, as I sometimes do at routine action pictures. I wanted to see the worst; there is a powerful need to see it.

Nashville
Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers – but an orgy without excess? At Robert Altman’s new, almost three-hour film, Nashville, you don’t get drunk on images, you’re not overpowered – you get elated. I’ve never before seen a movie I loved in quite this way: I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness. It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come down when the picture is over; you take it with you.

Taxi Driver
No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying. … The violence in this movie is so threatening precisely because it’s cathartic for Travis. I imagine that some people who are angered by the film will say that it advocates violence as a cure for frustration. But to acknowledge hat when a psychopath’s blood boils over he may cool down is not the same as justifying the eruption.

The Deer Hunter
He [Robert De Niro] fails conspicuously in only one sequence – when he’s required to grab Nick’s bloody head and shake it. You don’t shake someone who’s bleeding, and De Niro can’t rise above the stupidity of this conception; even his weeping doesn’t move us. We have come to expect a lot from De Niro: miracles. And he delivers them – he brings a bronze statue almost to life. He takes the Pathfinder-Deerslayer role and gives it every flourish he can dream up. He does improvisations on nothing, and his sea-to-shining-sea muscularity is impulsive. But Michael, the transcendent hero, is a hollow figure. There is never a moment when we feel, Oh my God, I know that man, I am that man.

Return of the Jedi
If a filmmaker wants backing for a new project, there’d better be a video game in it. Producers are putting so much action and so little character or point into their movies that there’s nothing for a viewer to latch on to. The battle between good and evil, which is the theme of just about every big fantasy adventure film, has become a flabby excuse for a lot of dumb tricks and noise. It has got to the point where some of us might be happy to see good and evil quit fighting and become friends.

Top Gun
What is this commercial selling? It’s just selling, because that’s what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director Tony (Make It Glow) Scott, know how to do. Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new “art” form: the self-referential commercial. Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.

Blue Velvet
The film’s kinkiness isn’t alienating – it’s naïveté keeps it from that. And its vision isn’t alienating: this is American darkness – darkness in color, darkness with a happy ending. Lynch might turn out to be the first populist surrealist – a Frank Capra of dream logic.

Platoon
I know that Platoon is being acclaimed for its realism, and I expect to be chastised for being a woman finding fault with a war film. But I’ve probably seen as much combat as most of the men saying, “This is how war is.”

Full Metal Jacket
It’s very likely that Kubrick has become so wrapped up in his “craft” – which is often called his “genius” – that he doesn’t recognize he’s cut off not only from America and the effects the war had on it but from any sort of connection to people. (The only memorable character in the his films of the past twenty years is Hal the computer.) What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie. He probably believes he’s numbing us by the power of his vision, but he’s actually numbing us by its emptiness. Like a star child, Kubrick floats above the characters of Full Metal Jacket, the story, the audience. Moviemaking carried to a technical extreme – to the reach for supreme control of his material – seems to have turned Kubrick into a machine.

Casualties of War
The movie about war and rape – De Palma’s nineteenth film – is the culmination of his best work. In essence, it’s feminist. I think that in his earlier movies De Palma was always involved in examining (and sometimes satirizing) victimization, but he was often accused of being a victimizer. Some moviegoers (women, especially) were offended by his thrillers; they thought there was something reprehensibly sadistic in his cleverness. He was clever. When people talk about their sex fantasies, their descriptions almost always sound like movies, and De Palma headed right for that linkage: he teased the audience about how susceptible it was to romantic manipulation. Carrie and Dressed to Kill are like lulling erotic reveries that keep getting broken into by scary jokes. He let you know that he was jerking you around and that it was for your amused, childish delight, but a lot of highly vocal people expressed shock. This time, De Palma touches on raw places in people’s reaction to his earlier movies; he gets at the reality that may have made some moviegoers too fearful to enjoy themselves. He goes to the heart of sexual victimization, and he does it with a new authority. The way he makes movies now, it’s as if he were saying, “What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?”

Born on the Fourth of July
Oliver Stone has a taste for blood and fire, and for the anguish and disillusionment that follow. Everything is in capital letters. He flatters the audience with the myth that we believed in the war and then we woke up; like Ron Kovic, we’re turned into generic Eagle Scouts.

Goodfellas
The filmmaking process becomes the subject of the movie. All you want to talk about is the glorious whizzing camera, the freeze-frames and jump cuts. That may be why young film enthusiasts are so turned on by Scorsese’s work: they don’t just respond to his films, they want to be him. When Orson Welles made Touch of Evil, the filmmaking process just about took over – that movie was one flourish after another. But that was 1958, and making a thriller about your own wallowing love of the film medium was a thrilling stunt.

Dances With Wolves
There’s nothing affected about Costner’s acting or directing. You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberate goofy faints and falls, and all the closeups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.)

Kael on Cult Cinema

[This wandering examination provides an interesting snapshot of Kael’s view of cinema closing out the 60s. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: The Bottom of the Pit,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in The New Yorker, September 27, 1969. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 329-333. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


A college-professor friend of mind in San Francisco who has always tried to stay in tune with his students looked at his class recently and realized it has time to take off his beads. There he was, a superannuated flower child wearing last year’s talismans, and the young had become austere, even puritanical. Movies and, even more, movie audiences have been changing. The art houses are now (for the first time) dominated by American movies, and the young audiences waiting outside, sitting on the sidewalk or standing in line, are no longer waiting for just entertainment. They waiting together may itself be part of the feeling of community, and they go inside almost for sacramental purposes. For all the talk (and fear) of ritual participation in the “new” theatre, it is really taking place on a national scale in the movie houses, at certain American films that might be called cult films, though they have probably become cult films because they are the most interesting films around.

What is new about Easy Rider is not necessarily that one finds its attitudes appealing but that the movie conveys the mood of the drug culture with such skill and in such full belief that these simplicities are the truth that one can understand why these attitudes are appealing to others. Easy Rider is an expression and a confirmation of how this audience feels; the movie attracts a new kind of “inside” audience, whose members enjoy tuning in together to a whole complex of shared signals and attitudes. And although one may be uneasy over the satisfaction the audience seems to receive from responding to the general masochism and to the murder of Captain America, the movie obviously rings true to the audience’s vision. It’s even cool to believe in purity and sacrifice. Those of us who reject the heroic central character and the statements of Easy Rider may still be caught by something edgy and ominous in it – the acceptance of the constant danger of sudden violence. We’re not sure how much of this paranoia isn’t paranoia.

Some of the other cult films try to frighten us but are too clumsy to, though they succeed in doing something else. One has only to talk with some of the people who have seen Midnight Cowboy, for example, to be aware that what they care about is not the camera and editing pyrotechnics; they are indifferent to all that by now routine filler. John Schlesinger in Midnight Cowboy and, at a less skillful level, Larry Peerce in Goodbye, Columbus hedge their bets by using cutting and camera techniques to provide a satirical background as a kind of enrichment of the narrative and theme. But it really cheapens and impoverishes their themes. … If Schlesinger could extend the same sympathy to the other Americans that he extends to Joe Buck and Ratso, the picture might make better sense; the point of the picture must surely be to give us some insight into these derelicts – two of the many kinds of dreamers and failures in the city. Schlesinger keeps pounding away at America, determined to expose how horrible the people are, to dehumanize the people these two are part of. The spray of venom in these pictures is so obviously the directors’ way of showing off that we begin to discount it. To varying degrees, these films share the paranoid view of America of Easy Rider – and they certainly reinforce it for the audience – but what the audience really reacts to in Midnight Cowboy is the two lost, lonely men finding friendship. …

At Midnight Cowboy, in the midst of all the grotesque shock effects and the brutality of the hysterical, superficial satire of America, the audiences, wiser, perhaps, than the director, are looking for human feelings – the simple, Of Mice and Men. kind of relationship at the heart of it. Maybe they wouldn’t accept the simple theme so readily in a simpler setting, because it might look square, but it’s what they’re taking from the movie. They’re looking for “truth” – for some signs of emotion, some evidence of what keeps people together. The difference between the old audiences and the new ones is that the old audiences wanted immediate gratification and used to get restless and bored when a picture didn’t click along; these new pictures don’t click all along, yet the young audiences stay attentive. They’re eager to respond, to love it – eager to feel.

Although young movie audiences are far more sentimental now than they were a few years ago (Frank Capra, whose softheaded populism was hooted at in college film societies in the fifties, has become a new favorite at U.C.L.A.), there is this new and good side to sentimentality. They are going to movies looking for feelings that will help synthesize their experience, and they appear to be willing to feel their way along with a movie like Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant, which is also trying to feel its way. I think we (from this point I include myself, because I share these attitudes) are desperate for some sensibility in movies, and that’s why we’re so moved by the struggle toward discovery in Alice’s Restaurant, despite how badly done the film is.

I think one would have to lie to say that Alice’s Restaurant is formally superior to the new Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In formal terms, neither is very good. But Alice’s Restaurant is a groping attempt to express something, and Butch Cassidy is a glorified vacuum. Movies can be enjoyed for the quality of their confusions and failures, and that’s the only way you can enjoy some of them now. Emotionally, I stayed with Penn during the movie, even though I thought that many of the scenes in it where inept or awful, and that several of the big set pieces were expendable (to put it delicately). But we’re for him, and that’s what carries the movie. Conceptually, it’s unformed, with the director trying to discover his subject as well as its meaning and his own attitudes. And, maybe for the first time, there’s an audience for American pictures which is willing to accept this.

Not every movie has to matter; generally we go hoping just to be relaxed and refreshed. But because most of the time we come out slugged and depressed, I think we care far more now about the reach for something. We’ve simply spent too much time at the movies made by people who didn’t enjoy themselves and who didn’t respect themselves or us, and we rarely enjoy ourselves at their movies anymore. They’re big catered affairs, and we’re humiliated to be among their guests. I look at the list of movies playing, and most of them I genuinely just can’t face, because odds are so strong that they’re going to be the same old insulting failed entertainment, and, even though I have had more of a bellyful than most people, I’m sure this isn’t just my own reaction. Practically everybody I know feels the same way. This may seem an awfully moral approach, but it comes out of surfeit and aesthetic disgust. There’s something vital to enjoyment which we haven’t been getting much of. Playfulness? Joy? Perhaps even honest cynicism? What’s missing isn’t anything as simple as talent; there’s lots of talent, even on TV. But the business conditions of moviemaking have soured the spirit of most big movies. That’s why we may be wiling to go along with something as strained and self-conscious as Alice’s Restaurant. And it’s an immensely hopeful sign that the audience isn’t derisive, that it wishes the movie well.

All this is, in a way, part of the background of why, after a few minutes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I began to get that depressed feeling, and, after a half hour, felt rather offended. We all know how the industry men think: they’re going to make “now” movies when now is already then, they’re going to give us orgy movies and plush skinflicks, and they’ll be trying to fed youth’s paranoia when youth will, one hopes, have has it off like last year’s beads. …

Being interested in good movies doesn’t preclude enjoying many kinds of crummy movies, but maybe it does preclude acceptance of this enervated, sophisticated business venture – a movie made by those whose talents are a little high for mere commercial movies but who don’t break out of the mold. They’re trying for something more clever than is attempted in most commercial jobs, and it’s all so archly empty – Conrad Hall’s virtuoso cinematography providing constant in-and-out-of-focus distraction, Goldman’s decorative little conceits passing for dialogue. It’s all posh and josh, without any redeeming energy or crudeness.

Much as I dislike the smugness of Puritanism in the arts, after watching a put-on rape and Conrad Hall’s Elvira Madigan lyric interlude (and to our own Mozart – Burt Bacharach) I began to long for something simple and halfway felt. If you can’t manage genuine sophistication, you may be better off simple. And when you’re as talented as these fellows, perhaps it’s necessary to descend into yourself sometime and try to find out what you’re doing – maybe, even, to risk banality, which is less objectionable than this damned waggishness. …

One can’t just take the new cult movies head on and relax, because they’re too confused. Intentions stick out, as in the thirties message movies, and you may be so aware of what’s wrong with the movies while you’re seeing them that you’re pulled in different directions, but if you reject them because of the confusions, you’re rejecting the most hopeful symptoms of change. Just when there are audiences who may be ready for something, the studios seem to be backing away, because they don’t understand what these audiences want. The audiences themselves don’t know, but they’re looking for something at the movies.

This transition into the seventies is maybe the most interesting as well as the most confusing period in American movie history, yet there’s a real possibility that, because the tastes of the young audience are changing so fast, that already tottering studios will decide to minimize risks and gear production straight to the square audience and the networks. That square audience is far more alienated than the young on – so alienated that it isn’t looking for anything at the movies.

Kael on Criticism

[On what would have been Pauline Kael’s 90th birthday, it’s appropriate we get some of her thoughts on criticism. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Replying to Listeners,” by Pauline Kael, originally aired on KPFA, January 1963. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 50-54. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


How completely has mass culture subverted even the role of the critic when listeners suggest that because the movies a critic reviews favorably are unpopular and hard to fine, that the critic must be playing some snobbish game with himself and the public? Why are you listening to a minority radio station like KPFA? Isn’t it because you want something you don’t get on commercial radio? I try to direct you to films that, if you search them out, will give you something you won’t get from The Parent Trap.

You consider it rather “suspect” that I don’t praise more “name” movies. Well, what makes a “name” movie is simply a saturation advertising campaign, the same kind of campaign that puts samples of liquid detergent at your door. The “name” pictures of Hollywood are made the same way they are sold: by pretesting the various ingredients, removing all possible elements that might affront the mass audience, adding all possible elements that will titillate the largest number of people. As the CBS television advertising slogan put it – “Titillate – and dominate.” …

I try not to waste air time discussing obviously bad movies – popular though they may be; and I don’t discuss unpopular bad movies because you’re not going to see them anyway; and there wouldn’t be much point or sport in hitting people who are already down. I do think it’s important to take time on movies which are inflated by critical acclaim and which some of you might assume to be the films to see.

There were some extraordinarily unpleasant anonymous letters after the last broadcast on The New American Cinema. Some were obscene; the wittiest called me a snail eating the tender leaves off young artists. I recognize your assumptions: the critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty, envious of the creative fire of the artist, and if the critic is a woman, she is supposed to be cold and castrating. The artist is supposed to be delicate and sensitive and in need of tender care and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century romanticism is pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia.

I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practices with honest, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or a film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.

Kael on Cinema Trash - Part IV (Worthwhile)

[Condensing this piece of classic Kael was a serious challenge; I’ve left a lot out, but I think the main arguments are here. In an effort to make it easier for folks to comment on individual arguments, I’m breaking up this excerpt into four parts. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in Harper’s, February 1969. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 200-227. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


In American movies what is most often mistaken for artistic quality is box-office success, especially if it’s combined with a genuflection to importance; then you have “a movie the industry can be proud of” like To Kill a Mockingbird or such Academy Award winners as West Side Story, My Fair Lady or A Man for All Seasons. … I’m not sure most movie reviewers consider what they honestly enjoy as being central to criticism. Some at least appear to think that would be relying too much on their own tastes, being too personal instead of being “objective” – relying on the ready-made terms of cultural respectability and on consensus judgment (which, to a rather shocking degree, can be arranged by publicists creating a climate of importance around a movie).

Just as movie directors, as they age, hunger for what was meant by respectability in their youth, and aspire to prestigious cultural properties, so, too, the movie press longs to be elevated in terms of the cultural values of their old high schools. And so they, along with the industry, applaud ghastly “tour-de-force” performances, movies based on “distinguished” stage successes or prize-winning novels, or movies that are “worthwhile,” that make a “contribution” – “serous” messagy movies. This often involves praise of bad moves, or dull movies, or even the praise in good movies of what was the worst in them. …

Does trash corrupt? A nutty Puritanism still flourishes in the arts, not just in the schoolteachers’ approach of wanting art to be “worthwhile,” but in the higher reaches of the audience life with those ideologues who denounce us for enjoying trash as if this enjoyment took us away from the really disturbing, angry new art of our time and somehow destroyed us. If we had to justify our trivial silly pleasures, we’d have a hard time. … I’ve avoided using the term “harmless trash” for movies like The Thomas Crown Affair, because that would put me on the side of the angels – against “harmful trash,” and I don’t honestly know what that is. It’s common for the press to call cheaply made, violent action movies “brutalizing,” but that tells us less about any actual demonstrable effects than about the finicky tastes of the reviewers – who are often highly appreciative of violence in more expensive and “artistic” settings such as Petulia. It’s almost a class prejudice, this assumption that crudely made movies, movies without the look of art, are bad for people.

If there’s a little art in good trash and sometimes even in poor trash, there may be more trash than is generally recognized in some of the most acclaimed “art” movies. Such movies at Petulia and 2001 may be no more than trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guises, using “artistic techniques” to give trash the look of art. The serious art look may be the attest fashion in expensive trash. All that “art” may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable trash; they’re not honestly crummy, they’re very fancy and they take their crummy ideas seriously. …

Part of the fun of movies is in seeing “what everybody’s talking about,” and if people are flocking to a movie, or if the press can con us into thinking that they are, then ironically, there is a sense in which we want to see it, even if we suspect we won’t enjoy it, because we want to know what’s going on. Even if it’s the worst inflated pompous trash that is the most talked about (and it usually is) and even if that talk is manufactured, we want to see the movies because so many people fall for whatever is talked about that they make the advertisers’ lies true. Movies absorb material from the culture and other arts so fast that some films that have been widely sold become culturally and sociologically important whether they are good movies or not. Movies like Morgan! or Georgy Girl or The Graduate – aesthetically trivial movies which, however, because of the ways some people react to them, enter into the national bloodstream – become cultural and psychological equivalents of watching a political convention, to observe what’s going on. And though this has little to do with the art of movies, it has a great deal to do with the appeal of movies. …

When you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie. But as you grow more experienced, the odds change. I saw a picture a few years ago that was the sixth version of material that wasn’t much to start with. Unless you’re feebleminded, the odds get worse and worse. … The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason – simply that they’ve seen it before.

And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit. They’re wrong when they blame it on the movies going bad; it’s the odds becoming so bad, and they can no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition. Some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new. Others who do stay awake may become too demanding for the young who are seeing it all for the first hundred times. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new. … If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, yet we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.


Keep reading Kael on Cinema Trash:
Part I (Art)
Part II (Technique)
Part III (Enjoyment)
Part IV (Worthwhile)

Kael on Cinema Trash - Part III (Enjoyment)

[Condensing this piece of classic Kael was a serious challenge; I’ve left a lot out, but I think the main arguments are here. In an effort to make it easier for folks to comment on individual arguments, I’m breaking up this excerpt into four parts. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in Harper’s, February 1969. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 200-227. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art. The movies we respond to, even in childhood, don’t have the same values as the official culture supported at school and in the middle-class home. At the movies we get low life and high life, while David Susskind and the moralistic reviewers chastise us for not patronizing what they think we should, “realistic” movies that would be good for us – like A Raisin in the Sun, where we could learn the lesson that a Negro family can be as dreary as a white family.

Movie audiences will take a lot of garbage, but it’s pretty hard to make us queue up for pedagogy. At the movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful. We get little things even in mediocre and terrible movies. … Do we need to lie and shift things to false terms – like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her acting had made her a star? Wouldn’t we rather watch her than better actresses because she’s so incredibly charming and because she’s probably the greatest model the world has ever known? …

Movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in the movies, it is not to be found in a return to that official high culture, it is what we have always found good in movies only more so. It’s the subversive gesture carried further, the moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings. At best, the movie is totally informed by the kind of pleasure we have been taking from bits and pieces of movies. But we are so used to reaching out to the few good bits in a movie that we don’t need formal perfection to be dazzled. There are so many arts and crafts that go into movies and there are so many things that can go wrong that they’re not an art for purists. We want to experience that elation we feel when a movie (or even a performer in a movie) goes farther than we had expected and makes the leap successfully. …

If we go back and think over the movies we’ve enjoyed – even the ones we knew were terrible movies when we enjoyed them – what we enjoying in them, the little part that was good, had, in some rudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace of beauty, some audacity, some craziness. …

Keeping in mind that simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art, it might be a good idea to keep in mind also that if a movie is said to be a work of art and you don’t enjoy it, the fault may be in you, but it’s probably in the movie. Because of the money and advertising pressures involved, many reviewers discover a fresh masterpiece every week, and there’s that cultural snobbery, that hunger for respectability that determines the selection of the even bigger annual masterpieces. …

Kicked in the ribs, the press says “art” when “ouch” would be more appropriate. When a director is said to be an artist (generally on the basis of earlier work which the press failed to recognize) and especially when he picks artistic subjects like the pain of creation, there is a tendency to acclaim his new bad work. This way the press, in trying to make up for its past mistakes, manages to be wrong all the time.


Keep reading Kael on Cinema Trash:
Part I (Art)
Part II (Technique)
Part III (Enjoyment)
Part IV (Worthwhile)

Kael on Cinema Trash - Part II (Technique)

[Condensing this piece of classic Kael was a serious challenge; I’ve left a lot out, but I think the main arguments are here. In an effort to make it easier for folks to comment on individual arguments, I’m breaking up this excerpt into four parts. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in Harper’s, February 1969. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 200-227. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


People who are just getting “seriously interested” in film always ask a critic, “Why don’t you talk about technique and ‘the visuals’ most?” The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very interesting. … The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art – the expressive use of techniques – it probably doesn’t even have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either. … If one compares movies one like to movies one doesn’t like, craftsmanship of the big-studio variety is hardly a decisive factor. And if one compares a movie one likes by a competent director such as John Sturges or Franklin Schaffner or John Frankenheimer to a movie one doesn’t much like by the same director, his technique is probably not the decisive factor. …

Technique is hardly worth talking about unless it’s used for something worth doing; that’s why most of the theorizing about the new art of television commercials is such nonsense. The effects are impersonal – dexterous, sometimes clever, but empty of art. It’s because of their emptiness that commercials call so much attention to their camera angles and quick cutting – which is why people get impressed by “the art” of it. Movies are now often made in terms of what television viewers have learned to settle for. …

I don’t mean to suggest that there is not such a thing as movie technique or that craftsmanship doesn’t contribute to the pleasures of movies, but simply that most audiences, if they enjoy the acting and the “story” or the theme of the funny lines, don’t notice or care about how well or how badly the movie is made, and because they don’t care, a hit makes a director a “genius” and everybody talks about his brilliant technique (i.e., the technique of grabbing an audience). … If a movie is interesting primarily in terms of technique then it isn’t worth talking about except to students who can learn from seeing how a good director works. And to talk about a movie like The Graduate in terms of movie technique is really a bad joke. Technique at this level is not of any aesthetic performance; it’s not the ability to achieve what you’re after but the skill to find something acceptable.

One must talk about a film like this in terms of what audiences enjoy it for or one is talking gibberish – and might as well be analyzing the “art” of commercials. And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoy got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made – which is more or less implicit. …

The new tribalism in the age of the media is not necessarily the enemy of commercialism; it is a direct outgrowth of commercialism and its ally, perhaps even its instrument. If a movie has enough clout, reviewers and columnists who were bored are likely to give it another chance, until on the second or third viewing, they discover that it affects them “viscerally” – and a big expensive movie is likely to do just that.


Keep reading Kael on Cinema Trash:
Part I (Art)
Part II (Technique)
Part III (Enjoyment)
Part IV (Worthwhile)

Kael on Cinema Trash – Part I (Art)

[Condensing this piece of classic Kael was a serious challenge; I’ve left a lot out, but I think the main arguments are here. In an effort to make it easier for folks to comment on individual arguments, I’m breaking up this excerpt into four parts. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in Harper’s, February 1969. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 200-227. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actors’ scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.

There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art. … It’s not so terrible – it might even be a relief – for a movie to be without the look of art; there are much worse things aesthetically than the crude good-natured crumminess, the undisguised reach for a fast buck, of movies without art. From I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf through the beach parties to Wild in the Streets and The Savage Seven, American International Pictures has sold a cheap commodity, which in its lack of artistry and in its blatant and sometimes funny way of delivering action serves to remind us that one of the great appeals of movies is that we don’t have to take them too seriously. …

But though I don’t enjoy a movie so obvious and badly done as the American International hit, The Wild Angels, it’s easy to see why kids do and why many people in other countries do. Their reasons are basically why we all started going to the movies. After a time, we may want more, but audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at “good taste” of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to the burlesque for.

Personally, I hope for a reasonable minimum of finesse, and movies like Planet of the Apes or The Scalphunters or The Thomas Crown Affair seem to me minimal entertainment for a relaxed evening’s pleasure. These are, to use traditional common-sense language, “good movies” or “good bad movies” – slick, reasonably inventive, well-crafted. They are not art. But they are almost the maximum of what we’re now getting from American movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as “art” – and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.

It’s preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art – as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a good time. I did have a good time at Wild in the Streets, which is more than I can say for Petulia or 2001 or a lot of other highly praised pictures. Wild in the Streets is not a work of art, but then I don’t think Petulia or 2001 is either, though Petulia has that kaleidoscopic hip look and 2001 that new-techniques look which combined with “swinging” or “serious” ideas often pass for modern picture art.

Let’s clear away a few misconceptions. Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money – and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the “artist’s intentions” you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.

The intention to make money is generally all too obvious. One of the excruciating comedies of our time is attending the new classes in cinema at the high schools where the students may quite shrewdly and accurately interpret the plot developments in a mediocre movie in terms of manipulation for a desired response while the teacher tries to explain everything in terms of the creative artist working out his theme – as if the conditions under which a movie is made and the market for which it is designed were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be analyzed like a lyric poem.


Keep reading Kael on Cinema Trash:
Part I (Art)
Part II (Technique)
Part III (Enjoyment)
Part IV (Worthwhile)

Kael on Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man

[Consider this a palate cleanser after yesterday’s daunting entry. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Rain Man: Stunt,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in The New Yorker, February 6, 1989. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 1190-1193. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


Rain Man is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes. It’s his dream role. As the autistic savant Raymond Babbitt, he’s impenetrable: he doesn’t make eye contact or touch anyone or carry on a conversation; he doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him. Autistic means self-involved, and Raymond is withdrawn in his world of obsessive rituals. So Hoffman doesn’t have to play off anybody; he gets to act all by himself. He can work on his trudging, mechanical walk and the tilt of his head and the irascible, nagging sameness of his inflections. Autistics aren’t known to be jerky like this (they’re more likely to move slowly and fluidly), but Hoffman’s performance has an intricate consistency. Even his tight voice fits his conception. …

Hoffman gets to play it all: a disconnected pesky child with inexplicable powers. For close to an hour, it’s an entertainingly comic turn. Intuitively, Hoffman seems to understand that we’d enjoy identifying with Raymond’s obstinacy – it’s his way to win out over his crummy brother – and when the audience laughs at Raymond the laughs are always friendly. He’s accepted as a harmless, endearing alien – E.T. in autistic drag. But then the performance has nowhere to go. It becomes a repetitive, boring feat, though the boringness can be construed as fidelity to the role (and masochists read it as great acting).

Slightly stupefied as I left the theatre, I wondered for a second or two why the movie people didn’t just have an autistic person play the part. (In the seventies, when Robert Wilson stages his A Letter for Queen Victoria, he used an actual autistic teen-ager in the show, with babbling trance-inducing music that seemed to evoke the fixations of an autistic child.) But with an actual autistic there would be no movie: this whole picture is Hoffman’s stunt. It’s an acting exercise – working out minuscule variations on his one note. It’s no more than en exercise, being Hoffman doesn’t challenge us: we’re given no reason to change our attitude toward Raymond; we have the same view of him from the beginning of the movie to the end. …

Rain Man is getting credit for treating autism “authentically,” because Raymond isn’t cured; in a simple transposition, it’s Charlie who’s cured. Actually, autism here is a dramatic gimmick that gives an offbeat tone to a conventional buddy movie. (Rain Man has parallels to several scenes in Midnight Run and Twins, but the standard buddy-movie tricks are so subdued that they might squeak by as “life.”)

The press has been full of accounts of the research into autism done by Hoffman and [Barry] Levinson and the principle scriptwriter, Ronald Bass, but what’s the use of all this research if then they rig the story and throw in a big sequence with Raymond using his whiz-bang memory to make a killing in as Vegas that takes care of Charlie’s money troubles? And what’s the point of setting up Raymond’s avoidance of being touched if Charlie is going to hold him while showing him how to dance and Charlie’s warm-hearted Italian girlfriend (Valeria Golino) is going to teach him how to kiss? (Is that something that Raymond is likely to be called on to do?) Everything in this movie is fudged ever so humanistically, in a perfunctory, low-pressure way. And the picture has its effectiveness: people are crying at it. Of course they’re crying at it – it’s a piece of wet kitsch.

Kael on Movies on TV

[Lots of discussion still to be had on the first and second posts of Pauline Kael Week. But we continue to press forward. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Movies on Television,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in The New Yorker, June 3, 1967. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 119-127. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


So much of what formed our tastes and shaped our experiences, and so much of the garbage of our youth that we never thought we’d see again – preserved and exposed to eyes and minds that might well want not to believe that this was an important part of our past. Now these movies are there for new generations, to whom they cannot possibly have the same impact or meaning, because they are all jumbled together, out of historical sequence. Even what may deserve an honorable position in movie history is somehow dishonored by being so available, so meaninglessly present. Everything is in hopeless disorder, and that is the way new generations experience our movie past.

In the other arts, something like natural selection takes place: only the best or the most significant or influential or successful works compete for our attention. Moreover, those from the past are likely to be touched up to accord with the taste of the present. In popular music, old tunes are newly orchestrated. A small repertory of plays is continually reinterpreted for contemporary meanings – the great ones for new relevance, the not so great rewritten, tackily “brought up to date,” or deliberately treated as period pieces. By contrast, movies, through the accidents of commerce, are sold in blocks or packages to television, the worst with the mediocre and the best, the successes with the failures, the forgotten with the half forgotten, the ones so dreary you don’t know whether you ever saw them or just others like them with some so famous you can’t be sure whether you actually saw them or only imagined what they were like. A lot of this stuff never really made it with any audience; it played in small towns or it was used to soak up the time just the way TV in bars does.

There are so many things that we, having lived through them, or passed over them, never want to think about again. But in movies nothing is cleaned away, sorted our, purposefully discarded. (The destruction of negatives in studio fires or deliberately, to save space, was as indiscriminate as the perseveration and resale.) There’s a kind of hopelessness about it: what does not deserve to last lasts, and so it all begins to seem one big pile of junk, and some people say, “Movies never really were any good – except maybe the Bogarts.” If the same thing happened in literature or music or painting – if we were constantly surrounded by the piled-up inventory of the past – it’s conceivable that modern man’s notion of culture and civilization would be very different.

Movies, most of them produced as fodder to satisfy the appetite for pleasure and relaxation, turned out to have magical properties – indeed to be magical properties. The fodder can be fed to people over and over again. Yet, not altogether strangely, as the years wear on it doesn’t please their palates, though many will go on swallowing it, just because nothing tastier is easily accessible. Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn’t go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they’re so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot’s wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful – our own innocence. We don’t try to reread the girls’ and boys’ “series” books of our adolescence – the very look of them is dismaying. The textbooks we studied in grammar school are probably more “dated” than the movies we saw then, but we never look at the old schoolbooks, whereas we keep seeing on TV the movies that represent the same stage in our lives and played much the same part in them – as things we learned from and, in spite of, went beyond. …

When people say of a “big” movie like High Noon that it has dated or that it doesn’t hold up, what they are really saying is that their judgment was faulty or has changed. They may have overresponded to its publicity and reputation or to its attempt to deal with a social problem or an idea, and may have ignored the banalities surrounding that attempt; now that the idea doesn’t seem so daring, they notice the rest. Perhaps it was a traditional drama that we new to them and that they thought was new to the world; everyone’s “golden age of movies” is the period of his first moviegoing and just before – what he just missed or wasn’t allowed to see. (The Bogart films came out just before today’s college kids started going.)

Sometimes we suspect, and sometimes rightly, that our memory has improved a picture – that imaginatively we made it what we knew it could have been or should have been – and, fearing this, we may prefer memory to the new contact. We’ll remember it better if we don’t see it again – we’ll remember what is meant to us. The nostalgia we may have poured over a performer or over our recollections of a movie has a way of congealing when we try to renew the contact. But sometimes the experience of reseeing is wonderful – a confirmation of the general feeling that we all that remained with us from childhood. And we enjoy the fresh proof of the rightness of our responses that reseeing the film gives us. We re-experience what we once felt, and memories flood back. What looks bad in old movies is the culture of which they were part and which they expressed – a tone of American life that we have forgotten. …

Probably in a few years some kid watching The Sandpiper on television will say what I recently heard a kid say about Mrs. Miniver: “And to think they really believed it in those days.” Of course, we didn’t. We didn’t accept nearly as much in old movies as we may now fear we did. Many of us went to see big-name pictures just as we went to The Night of the Iguana, without believing a minute of it. The James Bond pictures are not to be “believed,” but they tell us a lot about the conventions that audiences now accept, just as the confessional films of the thirties dealing with sin and illegitimacy and motherhood tell us about the sickly-sentimental tone of American entertainment in the midst of the Depression.

Movies indicate what the producers thought people would pay to see – which was not always the same as what they would pay to see. Even what they enjoyed seeing does not tell us directly what they believed but only indirectly hints at the tone and style of a culture. There is no reason to assume that people twenty or thirty years ago were stupider than they are now. (Consider how we may be judged by people twenty years from now looking at today’s movies.) Though it may not seem obvious to us now, part of the original appeal of old movies – which we certainly understood and responded to as children – was that, despite their sentimental tone, they helped to form the liberalized modern consciousness. This trash – and most of it was, and is, trash – probably taught us more about the world, and even about values, than our ‘education’ did. Movies broke down barriers of all kinds, opened up the world, helped to make us aware. And they were almost always on the side of the mistreated, the socially despised. Almost all drama is. And, because movies were a mass medium, they had to be on the side of the poor. …

People who see a movie for the first time on television don’t remember it the same way that people do who saw it in a theatre. Even without the specific visual loss that results from the transfer to another medium, it’s doubtful whether a movie could have as intense an impact as it had in its own time. Probably by definition, works that are not truly great cannot be as compelling out of their time. Sinclair Lewis’s and Hemingway’s novels were becoming archaic while their authors lived. Can On the Waterfront have the impact now that it had in 1954? Not quite. And revivals in move theatres don’t have the same kind of charge, either. There’s something a little stale in the air, there’s a different kind of audience. At a revival, we must allow for the period, or care because of the period. Television viewers seeing old movies for the first time can have very little sense of how and why new stars moved us when they appeared, of the excitement of new themes, of what these movies meant to us.

Kael on Epics (and Huston vs. Lean)

[The paint isn’t dry on the first discussion of Pauline Kael Week; keep that going. But here's another small sampling to broaden the discussion. Please read and react in the comments section.]

The following is excerpted from “Epics – The Bible,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in The New Republic, October 22, 1966. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 91-94. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


When the announcement was made that Norman Mailer’s An American Dream was to be made into a movie, my reaction was that John Huston was the only man who could do it. And what a script it could be for him! But Huston was working on The Bible … If, in making The Treasure of the Sierra Madre he risked comparison with Greed, and if with The Red Badge of Courage, he risked comparison with The Birth of a Nation, The Bible risks comparison with Intolerance. It is a huge sprawling epic – an attempt to use the medium to its fullest, to overwhelm the senses and feelings, for gigantic mythmaking, for a poetry of size and scope.

In recent years the spectacle form has become so vulgarized that probably most educated moviegoers have just about given up. They don’t think of movies in those terms anymore because in general the only way for artists to work in the medium is frugally. Though there might occasionally be great sequences in big pictures, like the retreat from Russia in King Vidor’s War and Peace, those who knew the novel had probably left by then. If, however, you will admit that you went to see Lawrence of Arabia under the delusion that it was going to be about T. E. Lawrence, but you stayed to enjoy the vastness of the desert and the pleasures of the senses that a huge movie epic can provide – the pleasures of largeness and distances – then you may be willing to override your prejudices and too-narrow theories about what the art of film is, and go to see The Bible.

For John Huston is an infinitely more complex screen artist than David Lean. He can be far worse than Lean because he’s careless and sloppy and doesn’t have all those safety nets of solid craftsmanship spread under him. What makes a David Lean spectacle uninteresting finally is that it’s in such goddamn good taste. It’s all so ploddingly intelligent and controlled, so "distinguished." The hero may stick his arm in blood up to the elbow but you can be assured that the composition will be academically, impeccably composed. Lean plays the mad game of superspectacles like the sane man. Huston (like Mailer) tests himself, plays the crazy game crazy – to beat it, to win.

The worst problem of recent movie epics is that they usually start with an epic in another form and so the director must try to make a masterpiece to compete with an already existing one. This is enough to petrify most directors but it probably delights Huston. What more perverse challenge than to test himself against the Book? It’s a flashy demonic gesture, like Nimrod shooting his arrow into God’s heaven.

Kael on Violence in Cinema

[Let’s kick off Pauline Kael Week with excerpts from her review of A Clockwork Orange. Kael wasn’t a fan of the film or its director, Stanley Kubrick, but she makes several arguments here that transcend the film in question. Please read and react in the comments section. Let's get a discussion going!]

The following is excerpted from “Stanley Strangelove,” by Pauline Kael, originally published in The New Yorker, January 1, 1972. It has been anthologized in For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies, pages 414-418. (In some cases, paragraph breaks and ellipsis have been added. All other punctuation is faithful to For Keeps.)


Stanley Kubrick’s Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is not so much an expression of how this society has lost its soul as he is a force pitted against the society, and by making the victims of the thugs more repulsive and contemptible than the thugs Kubrick has learned to love the punk sadist. The end is no longer the ironic triumph of a mechanized punk but a real triumph. Alex is the only likable person we see – his cynical bravado suggests a broad-nosed, working-class Olivier – and the movie puts us on his side. Alex, who gets kicks out of violence, is more alive than anybody else in the movie, and younger and more attractive, and McDowell plays him exuberantly, with the power and slyness of a young Cagney.

Despite what Alex does at the beginning, McDowell makes you root for his foxiness, for his crookedness. For most of the movie, we see him tortured and beaten and humiliated, so when his bold, aggressive punk’s nature is restored to him it seems not a joke on all of us but, rather, a victory in which we share, and Kubrick takes an exultant tone. The look in Alex’s eyes at the end tells us that he isn’t just a mechanized, choiceless sadist but prefers sadisms and knows he can get by with it. Far from being a little parable about the dangers of soullessness and the horrors of force, whether employed by individuals against each other for by society in “conditioning,” the movie becomes a vindication of Alex, saying that the punk was a free human being and only the good Alex was a robot.

The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In the new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it. …

When I pass a newsstand and see the saintly, bearded, intellectual Kubrick on the cover of Saturday Review, I wonder: Do people notice things like the way Kubrick cuts to the rival teen-age gang before Alex and his hoods arrive to fight them, just so we can have the pleasure of watching that gang strip the struggling girl they mean to rape? Alex’s voice is on the track announcing his arrival, but Kubrick can’t wait for Alex to arrive, because then he couldn’t show us as much. That girl is stripped for our benefit; it’s the purest exploitation. Yet this film lusts for greatness, and I’m not sure that Kubrick knows how to make simple movies anymore, or that he cares to, either. I don’t know how consciously he has thrown this film to the youth; maybe he’s more of a showman than he lets on – a lucky showman with opportunism built into the cells of his body. The film can work at a pop-fantasy level for a young audience already prepared to accept Alex’s view of the society, ready to believe that that’s how it is.

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films – the freedom to analyze their implications.

If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us – that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerns with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it’s eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it’s worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?


CONVERSATION STARTERS
(Not sure these are even necessary. Please feel free to go your own way.)

Does this 1972 review seem prophetic or dated?

In general: Does graphic imagery in cinema desensitize us to horrific violence, or does it expose its ugliness?

Do so-called “torture porn” films, like the Saw franchise, support Kael’s argument?

Is it exploitive or at least hypocritical to artfully romanticize or eroticize violence in a film intent to condemn violence?

In this specific example, is it possible that we can admire Alex and truly despise his actions? Do we become accomplices by becoming enthusiastic voyeurs of Alex’s crimes?

Could this line now apply to Fight Club and Tyler Durden? -- "The film can work at a pop-fantasy level for a young audience already prepared to accept Alex’s view of the society, ready to believe that that’s how it is."

Going Willingly: Drag Me To Hell

I am not the target audience for Drag Me To Hell, let’s get that out of the way. I’m as ignorant of the horror genre as I am indifferent to it. I understand the allure of a scary movie in principle – being terrified, clutching the person next to you (or being clutched), chewing through your Junior Mints box and then walking away with some kind of cathartic survivor’s high – it’s just not something I yearn for. I’d love to come off macho and say that I’m not easily frightened, but in fact the opposite is true. Scary movies scare the shit out of me. They don’t give me nightmares, nor do they make me afraid to walk down dark alleys in the middle of the night (even in cases when caution would be wise), but within the friendly confines of the movie theater, where I know that the only real danger is having someone’s drink spilled on me, I am petrified. When the defenseless pretty girl walks down the too-quiet hallway I Do Not Want To Look, which is problematic when you’re someone who, you know, likes watching movies.

But despite all the reasons I shouldn’t, or at least usually wouldn’t, I enjoyed Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell. I liked the parts when I was too scared to look. I liked the parts when I was scared and looked anyway. And I especially liked the parts when I looked, then looked away and then looked again, forcing my eyes to the screen not out of obligation but because I genuinely wanted to see what was going on. To my fright-averse mind, that’s the main ingredient separating Drag Me To Hell from the gruesome torture porn flicks or the black-water-soaked J-horror flicks or the ubiquitous unrelenting-masked-killer flicks. Simply put, this movie, written by Sam and Ivan Raimi, has an appealing story that I found myself caring about. If that makes me sound like the square recommending a Jenna Jameson film for its plot, so be it. Where shocks and monsters and chainsaws are concerned, I am admittedly something of a prude. But fear not, horror perverts; Drag Me To Hell comes through with all the sweaty thrills and chills that make you horny, baby. At least, I think it does.

Raimi’s film is stimuli potpourri. It’s packed with scenes of drawn-out tension and quick out-of-nowhere scares. It is slathered in B-movie gore, ejaculating blood or Nickelodeon-esque slime from multiple orifices. It is infused with creepy haunted house staples – gypsies, seers, spells and sacrifices. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny, eliciting amusement in the style of Will Ferrell in his underwear – because the humor is so nakedly and proudly lowbrow. We laugh, and then we laugh at ourselves for laughing, for succumbing to such adolescent absurdity that we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. It’s refreshing. Drag Me To Hell might as well run under a banner disclaimer saying, “It’s only a movie; enjoy yourself.” And we do. Telling the story of Christine (Alison Lohman), a SoCal transplant from farm stock who winds up cursed by an old gypsy with disgusting dentures and unmatching eyes (Lorna Raver), Raimi’s film is both participatory and voyeuristic. Whereas in forgettable horror films the characters are mere bait, luring the audience into a jump-in-your-seat trap, here Christine is more than an audience surrogate. As she endures all sorts of terror and trauma, as she is driven to extremes (“Here, kitty, kitty…”), we are made to feel for her plight even more than our own. That’s what’s great about it.

If there’s a significant fault with Drag Me To Hell it’s that, for all its lightheartedness and joyful spunk, it can’t escape the limitations of its genre. Alas, there are only so many ways things can go bump in the night. There are only so many ways a pretty girl can back away in fear only to turn around into the face of the very danger she is trying to avoid. There are only so many times that a door or curtain can surprise us with what’s on the other side. At some point, these gimmicks lose their effectiveness. Raimi’s picture uses all of these already-familiar tricks repeatedly. Sometimes the shear force with which Raimi’s jack-in-the-box explodes is still enough to make us recoil, but all that hand-cranking is nevertheless monotonous. That said, Drag Me To Hell isn’t without surprises. An early battle royale between Christine and the gypsy that’s staged in a car and utilizes office supplies as weapons is tremendous for the way it balances humor with horror, panic with playfulness. Raimi’s film dances to its own mischievous beat.

And what a beat it is! If you’re going to see this movie, you’re cheating yourself if you don’t see it in the theater. Fright-fests have always played better to the energy of a crowd, of course; that’s a given. But the more significant reason to head to the multiplex is to be immersed in the speaker-shattering ambiance achieved by the sound designer (Paul N.J. Ottoson). At its most awesomely catastrophic moments, Drag Me To Hell vibrates as if the ground might part and swallow the audience along with the damned. Here is a movie that frequently manifests evil in the form of menacing winds, and yet, thanks to the force of the acoustics, the danger is visceral. (M. Night? Are you paying attention?) Here is a movie so loud that you won’t care that the teenagers in front of you talk throughout whole fucking thing. (Kids? Are you paying attention?) Raimi’s film has visual effects, too, expensive ones, and all of them are effective, not because they are showstoppers but precisely because they are not; the effects serve the story rather than replacing it. (Michael Bay? Are you paying attention?)

For all that it has going for it, I suspect that horror diehards will find much to dislike in this picture. (Perhaps my outsider’s appreciation is the proverbial canary in the mineshaft.) Drag Me To Hell is rated PG-13, it should be noted, which will make genre purists skeptical from the jump. But unless braless women, teary-eyed terror and power-tool executions are essential ingredients to horror, it’s hard to figure what Drag Me To Hell could be missing. Seems to me that the only reason that Raimi’s picture is PG-13 instead of R is because of how tepid it is compared to the Saw movies, which are R when they should be NC-17. What Raimi’s picture sacrifices in gore it makes up for with general slapsticky (but still absolutely icky) grossness. Drag Me To Hell doesn’t rival the suspense or exhilaration of The Descent – the best horror film I’ve been brave enough to see in recent years – but who says is has to? Instead of being a typical horror yarn with a woman who can’t get away from merciless evil, Drag Me To Hell is a story about a young woman who for three days can’t catch a break. That’s a hell-on-Earth to which all of us can relate.