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Movie critic Kael diesCompiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- Pauline Kael, who expressed her passion for movies in jaunty, jazzy prose as the longtime film critic for the New Yorker, died Monday at her home. She was 82. Kael had Parkinson's disease. Kael was probably the most influential critic of her time. Enchanting fans and infuriating foes, rarely dull and often sharp and funny, with an intellectualism that reflected her background as a student of philosophy, Kael was always outspoken. She turned "The Current Cinema" into a leading fixture in the New Yorker, where she began in 1967. Over the years, her work also appeared in Film Quarterly, Mademoiselle, Vogue, the New Republic and McCall's. She retired in 1991. Her views often defied popular taste. She left McCall's after sounding off about The Sound of Music: "Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests . . . ?" She thought Rain Man a "wet piece of kitsch." For Dances With Wolves, she mocked director-star Kevin Costner as "having feathers in his hair and feathers in his head." But she equally disdained what she saw as pretension masquerading as high art. Among the contemporary films she admired were Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, MASH and Mean Streets. It was inevitable she would be criticized. George Lucas named the villainous General Kael in Willow for her, and in the New York Review of Books in 1980, writer Renata Adler called her work "piece by piece, line by line, without interruption, worthless."
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From the wire |
