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5001 Nights at the Movies

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This is a very good anthology of Pauline Kael's writings, but capsule reviews are very unsatisfying to those who are familiar with the strengths of her reviews as they were originally written. Kael is known for her flowing, "conversational" writing style; by chopping many of her reviews into two or three paragraphs, the main reasons for reading her in the first place tend to evaporate. In a typical Kael review, she literally layered opinions on top of opinions. It was not enough for her to simply review a movie--she had to express exactly how the directors and actors had grown (or diminished themselves). One looked forward to reading her because she had such a superb way of relating the film she was writing about to other films, whether by the same director or not, and she could intelligently speculate on how the film tied in to current events or may have been a product of them. She would talk expertly about how many films seemed to evolve out of other less superior ones and then expand due to a director's vision and desire to update a particular theme. Kael focused on what a movie is about--what it is really saying--and her dedication and playfulness was quite infectious (the many reviewers who used her style became known as Paulettes.) For a reference book, "5001 Nights At The Movies" is fun to look through; it is full of reviews but it is Kael-lite. She didn't call one of her best books "Deeper Into Movies" for nothing!

As someone who is just beginning to explore the classics, I love being able to see what Pauline Kael thought about many of the most important movies of our time. Since I often agree with her, it helps me save time and money in determining which movies I want to rent (and if not available to rent, buy). All movie titles are in alphabetical order, and there is an index in the back which contains film titles, directors, actors, etc.

However, the capsule reviews can occasionally be misleading. From the capsules, I thought Pauline liked (or at least didn't dislike) "8 1/2" by Fellini and "Hiroshima Mon Amour" by Resnais. But in her book "I Lost It At The Movies", the full reviews are a pretty harsh pan.

I also wish that she had a "Best Movies" list. Nevertheless, still a very useful (but thick) book.

Gosh... Movie reviewers can certainly offend easily. I agree with Pauline Kael's assessments roughly 50% of the time, but I still love reading her. She is always intelligent (even when she is wrong wrong wrong) --- and what a great writer! She manages to be "mean" over and over again without exactly being mean-spirited. And why on earth is a movie reviewer not supposed to have political opinions? I never understand this peculiarly American criticism. Can you review "Triumph of the Will" or "Rambo" or "La Chinoise" without venturing into the realm of politics? Probably, but why would you want to? I don't think the type of person who makes this criticism is really looking for a dry, studied dissection of film technique, but perhaps I'm wrong. Anyway, she's no more "political" than any other worthwhile reviewer I can think of. This book is full of buried treasures --- quite a few films in it that I had never even heard of before. It's just a darned entertaining read, too. Every few pages, there is a laugh-out-loud funny turn of phrase. Usually a pretty mean turn of phrase but it's hard to have harsh feelings towards someone who writes, for example, in her review of "Funny Lady", "The moviemakers weren't just going to make a sequel to 'Funny Girl'---they were going to kill us." Or, in a review of "The Last Tycoon", "...so enervated, it's like a vampire movie after the vampires have left."

Pauline Kael was at her tangy, erudite best in the long-form reviews she wrote for "The New Yorker." Nevertheless, these capsule reviews she culled from her longer articles to comprise "5001 Nights at the Movies" manage to capture the acerbic essence of her style. (There are a few exceptions, such as the bare-bones squib on the Gene Deitch-Jules Feiffer satirical cartoon "Munro," so short and bland that I wonder why they bothered to print it.)

Kael was the first celebrity film critic, and still the most bracing and fun to read, although she can be extremely annoying when you disagree with her. (I don't understand her enthusiasm for John Boorman's indigestible "Excalibur," or her condescending summation of John Ford's masterful "The Quiet Man" as "fearfully Irish and green and hearty," to give two of many examples.) Kael had an encyclopedic knowledge of film technique and history, and she was never afraid to call them the way she saw them. One of her sharpest putdowns was of the Dustin Hoffman-Mia Farrow romantic drama "John and Mary": "Remember when that man in `The Graduate' told Hoffman to go into plastics? Well, he did when he made this one." And she was no respecter of inflated reputations, as when she took on Alain Resnais' revered "Hiroshima, Mon Amour": "Hushed and hypnotic, it makes you feel so conscious of its artistry that you may feel as if you're in church and need to giggle."

Kael excelled at giving readers the exact mood and feel of a movie, and when she was right about a movie, she was very, very right. She puts the finger on Jean Cocteau's "Orphee": "Cocteau's special gift was to raise chic to art." And she was astute enough to call Kurt Russell "a star in the world of the mendacious" for his much underrated comic con man performance in Robert Zemeckis'"Used Cars." She also pinpointed the exact problem with Lawrence Kasdan's Western "Silverado": "The film is so opulent it has a nouveau riche aura about it; it's a counterfeit Western, without the feel of the memorable ones." The book doesn't quite live up to its title--there are 2,800-plus capsule reviews here, not the 5,001 the title would suggest. Nevertheless, they make compulsive reading. Like a giant tub of buttered popcorn, you'll find yourself consuming these reviews till you come to the end.

Pauline Kael is fascinating to read, providing you know that you won't necessarily agree with her. In fact, you'll probably become quite irritated with her blindness to the greatness of a film. But Kael is (was) a fantastic reviewer of film, because she never compromises her opinion, she makes you think, and most of all, she obviously loves movies. I say that she makes you think because when she trashes a movie that you may love, ("Star Wars," "2001: A Space Odyssey") you will start coming up with arguments to her points yourself. Thus, she does what any great critic should do: challenge your opinion of a film, and make you gain a new perspective of what made that film great or terrible. Furthermore, Kael was one of the first major critics to do this. I also said that Kael obviously loved movies. This really comes across when she gives a film a good review. Her praise is, to say the least, glowing. If she thinks that a film is brilliant, she seems almost giddy in her writing. In short, Pauline Kael possesses all the qualities of a great reviewer.

Mention the name "Pauline Kael" and you'll no doubt hear her work spoken in hushed tones and unwavering reverence. Indeed, the late film critic changed the way many writers approached reviewing movies. With the exception of James Agee, most critics prior to Kael's era tended to come off like high-minded Theater Critics slumming through a lower class of show business. Kael loved the movies for what they are- mass entertainment, and embarked on a buoyant writing style that gave the reader a visceral sense of a movie's immediacy with all the five senses she could muster. It was if she were a gourmand savoring each bite and describing the taste to a salivating dinner quest.

She was a dazzling writer. However, for me, oddly, there has always been a problem reading Kael. Her style and shtick (she had the jauntiest use for the English language) could sometimes smother out her main focus- the movies. When Kael's criticisms were fired up, you could not get more illuminating when she championed the likes of BONNIE AND CLYDE or picked a fight with a party-pooping film theorist. But other times, whether you agreed with her or not, she could be frustratingly dismissive or obtuse and do mere "drive-by's." I felt this way while wading through 5001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES. Kael's collection of capsules comments culled from over decades ultimately could be subtitled the "Best and Worst of Pauline Kael."

When chopped into smaller portions, Kael's reviews tend to read like a pastiche of ersatz thoughts and puns jotted down on pocket paper. She had a maddening inability to take just a few steps back and relive any movie from a different vantage point. Thus, you get the gist of the moment but nothing more expansive as to how a particular movie relates to the pop cultural landscape over time. Case in point is her review for FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE which she opines is "exciting, handsomely staged, and campy [?]" but writes little else before hitting the exit door. There is nothing about how the second James Bond adventure fits into the series' cannon or how the movie's cold war zeitgeist plays today. Instead we have to make do with her quickly assembled thoughts way back in 1963 that make her work seem uncharacteristically dated and out of touch. Elsewhere, oxymoronic word play pile up like "this isn't a good movie but it's compellingly tawdry and nasty," or "this isn't much of a movie but it manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway." Again, this was all part of Kael's shtick but if one is a novice and truly wants to use this book as an introduction to the world of movies you'd probably be left scratching your head as to what exactly does the lady mean here?

Look, when it comes to literature on the movies, Pauline Kael is a must. But for a readable, on-the-money, and multi-layered take on the movies you'd be better served by Danny Peary's GUIDE FOR THE FILM FANATIC (a personal favorite and sadly out of print) or any of Roger Ebert's yearly guides. These books go a longer distance and with much plainer language.

Having read Kael's work for years, I find untenable the assertion that she was favored European "art" film over American cinema. Any perusal of her writings will indicate that she lauded innovative American filmmaking - Scorsese ("Mean Streets", "Taxi Driver"), Coppola ("Godfather I" and "Godfather II"), Altman ("MASH", "McCabe", "Nashville", etc.) and was a discerning and forthright critic of "art" cinema - she does not exactly heap praise on Kubrick, she's rather reserved about Bergman (with some notable exceptions), doesn't have much use for Truffaut between "Jules et Jim" and "Adele H.", adored Antonioni's "L'Avenntura" but didn't like his other work (especially "Blow-Up"), disliked Fellini's carny-collages, and railied against the pretentious art-house cinema mind games of Resnais's "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbrad." While she does indeed praise many foreign films - and this alone seems enough to make her a snob in some people's eyes - one comes away from her works of directors she liked (Scorsese's 1980s films, Altman's 1980's films, Satyajit Ray's "Distant Thunder", Bunuel's "The Milky Way") and praised the works of directors she didn't (Alan Parker's "Shoot the Moon"). Granted, she was often critical of popular favorities (and some of my favorities, too - like "Goodfellas", "Wings of Desire", "Raiders of the Lost Ark") but a critic who kowtows to popular sentiment rather than exercises her own judgement isn't a critic but a publicist.

It's ironic that Kael spent most of her life criticizing those "snobs" (like Dwight MacDonald) who refused to acknowledge film as a popular art form - that there could be something aesthetic in a mass art form - and now, people accuse her of the same sort of arrogance. In truth, she was one of the most lucid and analytical film critics of her time. When she dug into a film's themes, a director's motives, an actor's performance, or a cinematographer's color scheme, she could make any subject complusively readable. And she performed the critics' most important function (which is not panning, despite what people may think) -- she helped one see elements and ideas in films that were frequently overlooked or taken for granted and she helped you to see them in new ways. You may have disagreed with her but you walked away from reading her work a sharper film viewer than before. The only flaw with a collection like "5000 Nights" is that all you get are summaries, not the complete reviews, so you can't get a full appreciation of her essayistic skills. For that reason, this book should be complemented with "For Keeps" to round out not only the breadth but depth of her writings

Pauline Kael (critic, author, scholar), is perhaps the most insightful film critic this century. Her book "5001 Nights at the Movies", though consisting only of short encapsulated reviews, is unparalleled in its witty, sometimes scathing, but ultimately impartial examination of cinema (past & present). Kael, thankfully, did not succumb to popular opinion, chosing to praise or scorn a movie for its artistic quality (or lack there of); she touted films that challenged and invited us to see things another way. This book isn't for the casual moviegoer looking to be pandered to. It is for those of us who still view cinema as an expressive and important art medium, instead of a vehicle for quick-fix, viewer condescension.

I agree with some of the other reviewers of the book in that Pauline Kael is always worth reading even when you will not agree with her opinions. It is great to have someone's real opinions rather than some tepid mirror of an imagined contemporary consensus.

On the other hand Kael goes well beyond expressing an opinion. It is clear that she has a personal agenda that influences all her writings. This is reflected in her powerful advocacy of the New Hollywood directors of the late 60s to 70s which, no surprise, happens to coincide with her own coming of age (at least as a professional critic). I think it is transparent in her writing but is also overtly made clear by Peter Biskind in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Indeed she played a significant role in bringing these directors to prominence and if only half the stories related by Biskind are true, she was hardly an impartial or disinterested voice. She was an insider and on her own particular power trip. Thus, in her support of these fantastically self-indulgent group of directors she must also take some responsibility for the big-studio backlash which we still suffer from today, namely big-budget, risk-averse blockbusters dependent for success more on their advertising budgets than true merit.

Finally, in common with several of the other reviewers I also would like access to the original full reviews rather than these encapsulated versions. Of course a print version would be far too big. I only have the original edition but am reluctant to put out another twenty-plus dollars just for the 90s update. But I would readily buy a CD/DVD-ROM version especially if it was (i) properly formatted for searching etc and (ii) had the full original reviews.

Pauline Kael did not specialize in capsule reviews, and in her NEW YORKER columns, any film that did not merit much more than one or two paragraphs was literally and figuratively being given 'short shrift.' The reviews in 5001 NIGHTS AND THE MOVIES were either written (kinda) anonymously for the "About the Town" section or have been largely been edited down from her lengthier reviews to make them more "browser friendly." There are upsides and downsides to this approach. Readers still get a flavor for Kael's sharp, quirky writing style, but also get to the heart of her criticism more readily than they would have in the longer format. Yes, you can see almost immediately whether she LOVED IT or HATED IT, but some of the fun in reading Kael's longer reviews lay in following the twists and turns in her arguments. The more you got used to her highly personalized and somewhat rambling writing style, the more you appreciated her insights, which could be wildly enthusiastic, bitingly negative OR (more often than people gave her credit for) understandably mixed.

Her writing often seemed like an attempt to reason through why a particular film mattered (implicitly, why it mattered to HER, but also why it might matter to other more or less like-minded souls). But even when she was dismissive of a film, she would often write at considerable length as to why it failed, why it still might be a popular success and why it may or may not matter as a cultural artifact, even if it was an artistic disaster.

As some other reviewers have stated: she got you thinking. And even if you vehemently disagreed with her, either in general, or on this or that particular film, that's always a good thing. I remember, in my early 20s, getting excited over the auteur theory debate that was raging(?) a few years prior between Kael and Andrew Sarris. After a bit of reflection, I decided they were both right, in their ways. I'm nothing if not a critical mamby pamby, I guess. But seriously, there was something to be said for the film-as-product-of-an-auteur school and for the film-as-collaboration school. Both critics enhanced my understanding of film, and if that's mamby pamby, so be it.

I'm glad to have this handy compendium of Kael's abbreviated writings. As noted, the capsule format makes for great browsing, and for many reviews, a reference for a more extended treatment (when available) is cited, so that researchers and new found fans can, if they choose, dig up a more exhaustive critique. Be advised, however, that many of the anthologies of her full length reviews are currently out of print. They still may be available through out-of-print services and in public libraries.

If you like what you find in this volume, don't stop there.