3 September, 2001: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
In her prime, Pauline Kael was a perceptive critic and a wonderful writer, but I found Kiss Kiss Bang Bang more interesting as a historical artifact. It's a collection of essays and reviews written between 1965 and 1967, not great vintages for American cinema. More to the point, Kael was writing these essays before the French New Wave and New Wave-inspired criticism had thoroughly legitimatized the high-culture study of film that Kael was performing, so there's an underlying pedagogical subtext. Kael is not simply trying to be an arbiter of taste in these essays (I feel that she was in her later years, and I also feel that her taste had declined), but instead offering by example her opinion on how to judge movies. And it's always fun reading the first draft of history -- I don't think any film critic writing now would dismiss Boorman's Point Blank with a sentence, but Kael doesn't muff any easy ones. It's always fun going through a volume of criticism like this and looking for howlingly bad judgments from the critics, but with early Kael I appreciate her reasoning and taste even when I disagree with her. That's more than I can say for most critics, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang gave me at least three ideas for movies I should rent, which is more than I can say for most film books.