Posted 5:51 PM by Gene

Today, trying to figure out which vintage movies to choose from Oldies.com, I turn to an inconvenient site filled with the opinions of Pauline Kael. Now I discover there's a tragedy to her career: at her best, and there's no denying how good she was at her best, she was perhaps the most insightful and forceful movie writer there ever was. When she calls a film "a real stinker" (as with the noir mellerdrammer Whirlpool) or "too terrible to be boring" (as with the immortal Lucille Ball disaster Mame) you know she's right. At her best she could make you laugh out loud: her just evisceration of the musical Lost Horizon remains a classic in invective. The tragedy, of course, is that in time she came to think herself better than her audience, and her gaga typing over select movies cemented the notion of her era as BETTER THAN EVER!, and then came her sellout work for the masterpiece NASHVILLE and the consulting jobs that followed, and her reviews became more and more raves -- and hanging over them all were The Sound of Music and NIXON. Worst of all she sired two generations of fifth-rate adjective spewers who think they're being Kael when they type out their flackery above the titles; for this influence she helped widen the gulf between commerce and art, and nearly every BEST PIC-TURE OS-CAR® winner of the last forty years bows in humble memory of the woman. And so we must read her dazzling opinions with a grain of salt that time and her influence have turned into the Bonneville Salt Flats.