The Carnal Critic

Pauline Kael stood only 4 feet 9 inches tall, but a decade after her death (and two decades after she published her last New Yorker review), her shadow still towers over the landscape of film criticism. Like it or lump it, if you write about movies in America today (and in the age of the Internet, who doesn?t?), you define yourself at least in part in relation to Kael. In fact, you probably channel her from time to time without realizing it. Even the second-person ?you? in those sentences echoes Kael?s chummy yet bullying voice: To read her is to be grabbed by the lapels and yanked down into the theater seat next to her. ?She?d have liked you,? a colleague said to me, shortly after Kael?s death and my start as a critic. It was a curiously heady, almost hubristic thought to entertain. For the nearly quarter of a century that she reigned as the New Yorker?s doyenne of film criticism and one of the country?s most visible public intellectuals, there were few cultural dispensations that conferred as much power as being liked by Pauline Kael. Her approbation could make a director?s or writer?s career, and her antipathy could sink it.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=4da2284bfcd4063dc63ef113dff42757

quarry quarry fred shuttlesworth rule 34 steve jobs bill gates frances bean cobain bill gates