There'll Always Be Posner: Thumbs Up on Preemption

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The New Yorker's current issue has a fine article on Pauline Kael. The weekend Wall Street Journal had a similar piece. Why the wall-to-Wall Street coverage of a film critic who wrote reviews from 1953 to 1991 and died in 2001? Two reasons: (1) the Library of America is coming out with a collection of Kael's reviews -- it's called "The Age of Movies," and that title says something about Kael's preeminence; and (2) there's a new biography by Brian Kellow -- "Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark."

All of this reminded us of how excited we were back in the 70's and 80's every week to pull a copy of The New Yorker out of the mailbox and flip to Kael's latest review. Her opinions mattered and she made movies matter. She dismantled silly critical systems (her attack on Andrew Sarris's auteur theory spills as much blood as ink on the page) and demolished fatuous high-culture/low culture distinctions (Kael and John Simon had some nasty exchanges). There's no doubt that Kael could be inconsistent and overwrought. Her famous review of the Italian neo-realist classic "Shoeshine" was as much about her personal romantic travails as about the movie. Kael wrote some incendiary, almost nutty things, comparing the premiere of "Last Tango in Paris" to the first perfomance of Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring," denigrating "Chinatown" for celebrating nostalgia "openly turned to rot," and praising Brian DePalma incessantly, even for possessing a "gassy, original comic temperament."

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