In 1979, Kael left The New Yorker to work as a producer and developer in Hollywood.
Kael was a small-time movie critic who had recently arrived from Northern California.
Now Kael went about the business of building a structure in the rubble.
Kael wrote as if the future of creative life lay on her shoulders.
This nostalgia-mongering is the opposite of what Kael stood for as a critic.
Kael published her first movie review in 1953, when she was thirty-three.
Kael cut her teeth reviewing for small, specialized or highbrow journals at a moment when criticism aimed at being systematic, intellectually lucid, and tightly defended.
And it let Kael think about moviemaking as a craft that could perform seemingly irreconcilable tasks: plying the artistic vanguard while providing unforced popular entertainment.
In 1946, when life out East proved too tenuous, Kael, still having published nothing, moved back to the Bay Area to live with her mother.
Kael wrote quickly and at length, regularly pulling all-nighters into her Tuesday deadlines with the help of cigarettes and bourbon (till she gave up both).
All of Otis Ferguson's published writings would fit with ease into a Library of America-size volume, as did the reviews of Mr. Agee and Ms. Kael.
WSJ: Otis Ferguson: A Film and Jazz Critic Still Waiting for His Due | Sightings By Terry Teachout
Where Kael made demands of the future, though, Wolcott has essentially produced a book-length complaint that the world is not the way it used to be.
Decades later, Kael glossed over these early efforts at writing as youthful caprice, the intellectual equivalent of a tacky butterfly tattoo from some wild long-ago summer.
Pauline Kael was that kind of critic, and, in her first years on the job at The New Yorker, she reviewed many of these movies with gusto.
Also present that night was the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and after a few drinks actually, after quite a lot of drinks Hirschfeld and Kael started quibbling about the uses of movie criticism.
Kael and Didion had parallel flight paths: both were Northern California kids who had close-read Henry James at Berkeley, gone East to get their bearings, and returned to California to forge their styles.
The Kael who comes into focus in the long shot is a different sort of critic, haunted by the old classics and obsessed with the place of movies in the canon of lasting art.
Another theory suggests that Kael changed the rules of criticism, setting up a new way of evaluating popular art, without concern for prestige or self-conscious sophistication: in her view, a freshly entertaining or arresting movie was successful, and a movie that seemed tired or required unpacking was a flop.
应用推荐