State of the Art
Kael, Pauline
Democrats, and self-mortification is a religious ritual in that particular sect. The rest of us may have wondered: If Jesse Jackson did not exist, would it be necessary to invent him? No law bears...
...U I,iberryPtecs LibertyClassics SELECTED WRITINGS OF LORD ACTON VOLUME I ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY By John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton Edited by J. Rufus Fears Lord Acton was among the most significant figures in the intellectual life of Victorian England...
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...558 +xxx pages...
...Conservatives in particular should . . . salute his achievement as not merely an intellectual feat but also an unparalleled act of service to the Republic...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...The authors are concerned that Jesse Jackson represents a disturbing phenomenon...
...dollars...
...Greer Car-son in her Mrs...
...Patriotism—of the American variety, anyway—disturbs Kael as well...
...Hardcover $15.00, 0-86597-046-7 Softcover $ 7.50, 0-86597-047-5 Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...Morality rubs Kael the same way...
...There are old movies by the score that we remember fondly not because they are great examples of cinematic art but because we first saw them with people we loved, because we once had pubescent crushes on the stars, because our mothers loved them...
...When Aurora and Rosie hug each other—sisters under the skin—the audience is alerted that Aurora is really a good person, and from then on she becomes useful and considerate...
...Civil rights is conventional wisdom, not an exclusive preserve, or the strategy of a private army...
...They detect a pattern of deception and suspect unworthy motives...
...It has transcended politics...
...It is against such obscene moral messages that Kael is on the warpath...
...By the same token, Kael tends to denigrate movies, actors, and directors that give the impression of being polished and professional, of striving for excellence or seamlessness or a touch of class...
...indeed, he was close to dismissal from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference when James Earl Ray intervened on his behalf...
...But time passes, and the mills tend to turn out bread rather than more grist...
...If he is not the black leader, he is a black leader...
...Forward, index...
...Self-promoting, double-crossing, scene-stealing, he seems to have learned the value of publicity from his putative mentor, but little else...
...play-by-play account of her sensual engagement with them...
...To her mind, manifestly, her role as a film critic is not to attempt to transcend subjectivity but to exult in it, to exalt it...
...They are distressed by his insincerity, startled by his company...
...I like to think that Jesse Jackson will continue to entertain, rather than disturb...
...The difference is between a tribune and a spokesman, between fighting for right and lobbying for ad-vantage...
...Included are such essays as "The History of Freedom in Antiquity "The History of Freedom in Christianity and "The Puritan Revolution...
...She means, patently, to give the impression that she is providing us with The Last Word on these movies—and, in-deed, on the state of the art...
...He may not have satisfied his listeners in the room, but he- spoke to a wider audience...
...And, as the whole world indubitably knows, Pauline Kael loves going to the movies...
...From the way it looks, he just uses the sweet starry radiance that nature gave him, and smiles his relaxed, all-American-sweetheart smile...
...Sometimes she uncannily echoes one's own reaction to a movie, down to the last detail: her verdict of All of Me, for instance, is identical to my own...
...The authors are especially skillful in their examination of the Jackson mythology, his irresistible rise and unquestioned mastery—one might say intimidation—of the media...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...He is assertive without being combative...
...she writes that Spottiswoode's revolutionaries, "with their poetic peasant faces, are presented in a grand, naive, idealized movie tradition'—and not only doesn't it bother her a bit, she seems to be rather touched by the romanticism of it all...
...Take away the marketing techniques...
...Where will Jesse Jackson be tomorFor most of us, it's difficult at times to look at film critically...
...A rain-bow coalition that is painfully monochrome—who would notice...
...Spectacle can be interesting, and curiosity is easily piqued...
...If Altman and Brian De Palma (two of America's most self-indulgent directors) earn her praise for their movies' crude, quasi-naturalistic vitality, their more consistently competent (and, in my view, far more gifted) colleagues Robert Benton and George Roy Hill earn little from her except contempt for their "inauthenticity...
...Words mean for Jesse Jackson what he wants them to mean, no more and no less...
...It is not, I think, altogether coincidental that the film Kael reviews most favorably in State of the Art is Roger Spottiswoode's pro-Sandinista Under Fire...
...Dutton/$22.50 Bruce Bawer 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 (as she has acknowledged in many an interview) performs the critical act spontaneously, without premeditation, she tends to admire excessively the work of directors and actors who work the same way—or seem to...
...All of this is true, but little of it is important...
...and what is left...
...She's perceptive, she's sensitive, she knows a great deal about film technique, she's intelligent (though, it must be said, she invariably applies her critical intelligence more generously to the articulation than to the formulation of her critical opinions...
...The success of the civil rights movement has no more eloquent testimony than the elusiveness of"black leadership...
...The press was mystified by his devotion to Louis Farrakhan, but only the press would entertain such expectations...
...This is a realistic, tough-minded book about the role of ideas among practical men of affairs at a pivotal and difficult moment in human history...
...She admires movies like Melvin and Howard and Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean for the same reason: they have an off-the-cuff, unrehearsed, "natural" feel...
...After all, we grew up on movies in a way we didn't grow up on serious art or music or literature: the genre is full of sentimental associations for us...
...Let's talk black talk, he said to a black reporter on one memorable occasion, and lapsed into the vocabulary of anti-Semitism...
...Likewise, she revolts against the "old-movie make-believe" of The Natural, declaring that it "seems to be caught in a time warp...
...Why read about him...
...LibertyClassics is publishing a three volume series of Selected Writings of Lord Acton under the editorship of Professor J. Rufus Fears...
...No book is more likely to demonstrate . . . the sheer excitement that can still be generated when a first rate mind confronts one of the monumental events of modern history...
...She describes Sylvester Stallone, for instance, as "the stupidos' Orson Welles...
...If even a single one of them matches this one in insight and clarity, that will be an occasion for national rejoicing...
...There he became the organizer and first editor of the Cambridge Modern History...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...Needless to say, however, you can take this sort of detail work too far...
...Her famous, embarrassing veneration of Robert Altman's now terribly dated film Nashville ("the funniest epic vision of America ever to reach the screen") is a case in point: she worshipped the movie not principally because of its political message (though that was part of it), but mainly because the whole thing had such a spur-of-the-moment feel to it, because the script wasn't taken too seriously, because "the actors [were] encouraged to work up material for their roles...
...only the Syrians would find him worthy to be manipulated...
...It is convenient to divide ideas into personalities (liberalism: FDR, Hubert Humphrey...
...To name one: being a critic who STATE OF THE ART Pauline Kael/E.P...
...The fact that he fascinates, or an appetite persists for his image and message, is the perverse side of human nature...
...What was once People United to Save Humanity is now People United to Serve Humanity...
...She lives them, she breathes them, she worships them, she is at once their high priestess, devoted spouse, and in-satiably aroused mistress: such, at least, is her public image...
...So, too, are her characteristic prejudices...
...Granted, her lengthy considerations of such fine movies as The Purple Rose of Cairo and A Passage to India (both of which, thankfully—and, in the latter case, quite surprisingly—she smiles upon in State of the Art) are far from unwelcome...
...He and Aurora are good Americans...
...The demolished automobile will slow down traffic, but novelty wears off easily...
...He is learned, but wears his learning lightly...
...She's got Arthur Hiller's number: he's "made more than twenty pictures, but he must keep his eyes closed on the set...
...E. Bradford, writing in The National Review "An important, comprehensive statement about the most fundamental period in American history...
...Acton wrote many essays, reviews and letters which reflect his great learning and his deep concern with liberty as the central concept for the understanding of history...
...and leadership, he seems to think, is something seized rather than earned...
...For that, at least, we can be thankful...
...Indeed, if a bad book is only a bad book, a bad movie—if you're sitting in a theater that has a huge screen, an excellent sound system, and a first-rate, unscratched, color-perfect, 70-millimeter print—can nonetheless be a terrifically powerful visceral experience...
...The first volume contains material related to three of Acton's leading interests: the history of liberty, the particular contribution made by England and America to the course of liberty, and the effect on liberty of contemporary European political developments...
...but her protracted disquisitions upon the thematic and cinematographic subtleties of such undistinguished fare as Micki and Maude, Moscow on the Hudson, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (all of which receive glowing reviews in State of the Art) are grotesquely overdone...
...Not long before his death, I made a pilgrimage to a strip joint in Washington to watch George Jessel perform...
...Was there ever in all of history, one wonders, a critic as famous for his love of the genre under his scrutiny as is Pauline Kael...
...What provocation will capture the six o'clock news...
...Orders must be prepaid or charged to VISA or MasterCard...
...Likewise, she considers Nick Nolte "an ideal screen actor" because of his "rough edges" (he "seems unfinished"), ad-mires the rock star Prince because he's a wild, impulsive "passionflower imp," and adores Matt Dillon, to whom she devoted a heartfelt panegyric in her last book, Taking It All In: Actors who have labored to learn the rudiments of their profession must want to kill the potential teen idol Matt Dillon, the open-faced young star of Tex...
...She justly nails Sidney Lumet for the emotional manipulativeness and dishonesty of Daniel, Bob Fosse for the facile and arrogant nihilism of Star 80, and Paul Brickman for Risky Business's offensive view of prostitution as "a hot girl's practical and honest approach to business...
...It's less true, in other words, to say that Kael writes about movies than to say that she writes about going to the movies...
...No institution endures because he laid the foundation...
...Where he will go and how he will subsist, I cannot say...
...P104 Indianapolis, IN 46250 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986...
...When he spoke some contrite syllables to an audience of Jews, he switched glossaries, and the expedient worked...
...In her tenth book, State of the Art, in which she has gathered her reviews of 117 movies released in 1983, 1984, and 1985, both her considerable strengths and her lamentable weaknesses are in full flower...
...Make checks payable to University Press of Kansas...
...In the eighteen years since King died, the movement he personified has missed its crowned head...
...But I think I know...
...Save, serve—what's the difference...
...Which leads us to the real question, why...
...Even his gift for baby-macho comedy seems part of the package...
...Contempt for democracy is often an article of faith among the sages and brokers of politics, but Jackson is important where it doesn't count...
...The problem, of course, is that now there is no movement...
...He must journey to Cuba to be treated as a head of state...
...similarly, if she cherishes the Matt Dillons and Princes, she is particularly unenamored of Julie Andrews, whom she considers "infuriatinglysane" and (one gets the impression) too prodigiously talented for comfort...
...She notices important things that other movie critics don't, like good lighting, bad framing, predominant color tones, and shots that have been held a beat too long...
...there are recent films that move us to uncritical raptures with their beautiful scenery, beautiful faces, or all-Mozart scores...
...The Democrats who make any difference—that is to say, those who vote—resolutely declined to take him seriously...
...Sanford Levinson, coauthor of Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking "What a splendid book...
...Blacks don't need Jesse Jackson—no more, at least, than the Democrats—and the futility of concern about personal leadership is summed up in the incoherence of his journey since 1968...
...Signature Charge it by phone: 913-864-4154 DSPE THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1986 39 agree with her statement that there is an atmosphere of "calculated humanity" in Terms of Endearment (just as I would join, though for somewhat different reasons, in her disesteem for many of these films), but her knee-jerk rejection of such movies frequently seems to have more to do with her antipathy towards their creators' fundamental assumptions about morality and human character than with the movies themselves...
...She takes Cross Creek to task for its at-tempt at "radiant respectability," The Right Stuff for its "Victorian values," The Natural for its "sludge of moral uplift," and Country for its supposed resemblance to "old Saturday Evening Post covers" (a charge she leveled against On Golden Pond, too...
...Fortunately, at times Kael is right on the money, and wittily so...
...The moral, then, is in the subtitle: the politics of race...
...Alas, the answer is found on every doorstep: the press...
...generally—but, alas, one's overriding impression is of a critical faculty that is ludicrously self-indulgent and bereft of a sense of proportion...
...Success came quickly, perhaps unexpectedly, in social as well as legislative form...
...not to analyze films but (to draw a fine but fundamental distinction) to give us a Bruce Bawer writes on writers and fiction for the New Criterion...
...It deals authoritatively with topics no student of America can afford to ignore...
...Gum-my is one of her trademark adjectives...
...Michael Kammen, author of A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and Historical Imagination "A magnificent recreation .. . The next two years will see the publication of literally dozens of books on the history of the Constitution...
...He was neither King's chosen deputy nor anointed successor...
...King's progress was not a cult of personality but a crusade of ideas...
...Jackson is a kind of minor irritant, a boil in the social hind quarters...
...This is not to deny, of course, that Kael is an unusually engaging writer—a fun writer—and, in many ways, a highly gifted critic...
...He doesn't apply any particular sexual heat in this movie, and he isn't crafty, like James Dean—there are no Method mannerisms, no affectations of any kind...
...And that is the heart of the matter...
...Here, for once, the use of old-movie-type cliches seems perfectly okay by her...
...The Democrats may have held him in unaccustomed esteem, but their electors avoided him in droves...
...She's so keenly on the lookout for pro-American messages that she fmds them even where they do not exist...
...What Dillon does in Tex may not be the result of studying technique, but it works better on camera than most trained acting does...
...The uniform was unchanged, the voice was the same, and so were the jokes...
...It was an extraordinary, but not altogether unfitting, home port into which he had sailed...
...The details are fascinating: He grew up in comparative comfort, not the Third World squalor he characteristically invokes...
...It's all this that makes the job of movie reviewing—the job, that is, of getting beneath the subjective associations and the visceral experience and judging the film as a work of art—particularly challenging...
...He has careened from one gimmick to another, the author of a series of false starts and broken pledges...
...Harvey Mansfield, author of The Spirit of Liberalism A History Book Club selection 360 pages, $25.00 "This is vintage McDonald...
...Kael's critical method is implicitly founded upon the hypothesis that the sort of distinction I've just made is a spurious one...
...The smooth meticulousness of Places in the Heart—what some might call its craftsmanship—drives me a little crazy," she complains in State of the Art...
...0 University Press of Kansas 329 Carruth, Lawrence KS 66045 Name Address City State Zip MasterCard VISA Expires Account no...
...row...
...No cause but Jesse Jackson has his unqualified allegiance...
...But not for Pauline Kael, who's been reviewing movies in the New Yorker since 1968...
...And so it is with Kael...
...he straightens up and does the right thing...
...The movie asks: Will Roy be spiritually strong enough to triumph...
...M...
...In this instance, the media—and, to be fair, academia, Congress, the social statisticians, and others who should know better—have never fully grasped what is otherwise so obvious: When ideas take root, they form the common mind...
...It is true that the differences that divide Americans pro-vide a kind of grist for social upheavaland evolution...
...The language of electronic celebrity is noise, and the currency of blab is emotion not meaning...
...even when the action is outdoors, it has the gummy drabness of institutional life...
...Acton's famous aphorism "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" may be juxtaposed with another Acton line "the development of liberty is the soul of history...
...conservatism: Robert Taft, Ronald Reagan), but it is also misleading...
...About Daniel, for instance, she complains: "The picture often looks plain ugly, as if there were barnacles on the lens...
...The Democrats were alternately bullied and seduced, but Jesse Jackson is just another Balkan prince dividing their unhappy kingdom...
...the others include logy and cheesy...
...It is often forgotten that Martin Luther King was nearly redundant at the time of his death, misconstrued by reactionaries but scorned by radicals...
...Miniver drag was only a shade more noble...
...From the moment Martin Luther King lay murdered, Jackson's career has been a whirlwind of airport connections, jerry-built alliances, proclamations, and press conferences—leadership by news release...
...He's a "natural," who takes the camera with the baffling ease of a puppy...
...I, for one, would readily "Bristles with wit and intellectual energy "—CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution Forrest McDonald "A masterpiece .. . McDonald's status as an interpreter of the Constitution is unequalled—magisterial...
...It is scarcely an accident that his language is so wild and imprecise, that exaggeration is his form of emphasis...
...Viewers can feel they're in direct contact with this luminous kid...
...There's no consistency of judgment or taste in a Hiller picture, and often they run downhill...
...I would even argue that he is a symptom of national health...
...Black nationalism is no more likely to endure than white nationalism, and while Jesse Jackson is alive and Martin Luther King is dead, it is Jackson who is the anachronism...
...Is there any, for that matter, who has celebrated his hyper-impressionistic tendency to approach that genre as a well-nigh erotic object as blatantly as has Kael, with such titles as I Lost It at the Movies, Reeling, Taking It All In, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies, and When the Lights Go Down...
...As the Secand World War movies taught us, the function of adversity is to build character...
...She notices interesting if trivial touches, like the fact that Kevin Kline's shoe-store chain in The Big Chill is called "Running Dogs" and that "Elliott," the name of the boy hero of E.L• The Extraterrestrial, begins with an "E" and ends with a "T...
...Toward the end of her review of Terms of Endearment, for instance, she declares sardonically that "Garrett is like those wastrel British aristocrats in the pukka-sahib pictures: when the crisis comes,his fundamental decency rises to the surface...
...No law bears his imprint, no doctrine boasts his name...
...Termsof Endearment provokes a diatribe against "retro-forties virtue": I think I hated Terms of Endearment the most when the grief-stricken Aurora em-braces her longtime servant, Rosie (Betty R. King), who shares her misery...
...His enormous erudition won him the admiration of Gladstone and led to his election to the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge...
...What rhetoric can maintain interest...
...And what a pleasure to read history that gets to the heart of the ideas directly...
Vol. 19 • April 1986 • No. 4
