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HONEST_KALE

                                             January 14-18, 2013

   "One foundation executive told me that he was quite
   upset that his teen-agers had chosen to go to
   'Bonnie and Clyde' ...  He took it as a sign of
   lack of maturity. I think his kids made an honest
   choice, and not only because 'Bonnie and Clyde' is         KAEL_TECHNIQUE
   the better movie, but because it is closer to us,
   it has some of the qualities of direct involvement         And if you don't
   that make us care about movies."                           agree, you must
                                                              be dishonest.
    -- Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art, and the Movies"


                                                      AGAINST_THE_MIDDLE
   So, here we have the honesty, the
   *authenticity* of the pure populist
   response...

   And the unfortunate vulnerability of
   the public to the opinions promulgated
   by respectable critics --

   But for some reason, we're *not*
   supposed to reject Kael's opinions    The problem of
   along with the other critic's...      authority that
                                         plagues all of
                                         modernism:

                                             The rebel assaults the cathedral,
                                             and yet, why should you have any
                                             faith in the rebel?



                                 Pollack was brilliant, and
                                 yet "my kid could do that".

                                 Cage's work is fascinating,
                                 but... was he *really* a composer?

                                                         HONEST_JOHN


  "It's the feeling of freedom from
  respectability we have always enjoyed
  at the movies that is carried to an
  extreme by American International
  Pictures and the Clint Eastwood
  Italian Westerns; they are stripped
  of cultural values."

    -- Pauline Kael, "Trash, Art, and the Movies"
       [link]

  Really?  Myself I can't imagine how you
  would strip an art form of "cultural
  values"...  unless you had a very snobbish
  High Art view of what constituted "culture".

      But Honest Kael is a woman
      of the people, right?

          Or maybe the idea is that Kael
          was once a common person, before
          having crossed over into her
          state of critical omniscience.

            By the end of the essay she's
            talking about how she's moved      GROWING_KAEL
            beyond this, e.g.  she's
            losing interest in fiction...

            She even complains about those damn kids
            who don't know the history of the medium,
            and are fooled by things that have been
            done before.


   So okay kids: do you
   need to be up on the
   complete works of       If you do, then this is
   Cagny, Raft, and        something you might
   Bogart before you can   look to a Pauline Kael     On the other hand,
   make sense of Bonnie    for help with-- a          lazy critics intent
   and Clyde?              knowledgeable critic       on "documenting
                           who can point out some     their own reactions"
   Do you need a deep      antecedents for you,       or some such, that
   background in           and show how they place    might be less useful.
   pirate movies           your current faves in
   before you can          context.                   Or showing off how
   comprehend the                                     smart they are by
   60's anti-hero?                                    cleverly trashing
                                                      one of everyone
                                                      else's favorites.

                                                             2001_KAELS



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