Pauline Kael, Tastemaker
In this week's New Yorker, there's a great line in Nathan Heller's article on Pauline Kael:
--Hold on. Before I hit "paste," I should probably explain who the hell Pauline Kael was to all you kids who come here expecting fart jokes and skateboard videos. (Patience, that is still what this site is about. Future posts will work to combine both.) Kael was a film critic for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. She was to that subset of criticism what James Brown was to his trade. Her style, at once casual and authoritative, was a major influence on a generation of critics. Roger Ebert, a friend and acolyte, wrote in 2006: "[I]n 1967, I met Pauline Kael and Werner Herzog and many others, but to meet those two was of lifelong importance. Kael became a close friend whose telephone calls often began with 'Roger, honey, no, no, no,' before she would explain why I was not only wrong but likely to do harm."
So that's who the hell Pauline Kael was. Without further ado, here is that line from Heller's article. He is describing a dinner party in '65 at the director Sidney Lumet's apartment , at which Kael, then a "small-time movie critic" from Northern Cailforna, was a guest:
--Hold on. Before I hit "paste," I should probably explain who the hell Pauline Kael was to all you kids who come here expecting fart jokes and skateboard videos. (Patience, that is still what this site is about. Future posts will work to combine both.) Kael was a film critic for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. She was to that subset of criticism what James Brown was to his trade. Her style, at once casual and authoritative, was a major influence on a generation of critics. Roger Ebert, a friend and acolyte, wrote in 2006: "[I]n 1967, I met Pauline Kael and Werner Herzog and many others, but to meet those two was of lifelong importance. Kael became a close friend whose telephone calls often began with 'Roger, honey, no, no, no,' before she would explain why I was not only wrong but likely to do harm."
So that's who the hell Pauline Kael was. Without further ado, here is that line from Heller's article. He is describing a dinner party in '65 at the director Sidney Lumet's apartment , at which Kael, then a "small-time movie critic" from Northern Cailforna, was a guest:
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