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I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965
(The Film Writings #1)
by
I Lost it at the Movies is vintage Kael on such classics of post-War cinema as On the Waterfront, Smiles of a Summer Night, West Side Story, The Seven Samurai, Lolita, Jules et Jim etc. Her comments are so fresh and direct, it's as if the movies had only been released last week.
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Paperback, 250 pages
Published
January 1st 1994
by Marion Boyars Publishers
(first published 1965)
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Start your review of I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965
Remember when movies were worth seeing ?
Kael on "Lolita" (Kubrick) : "A black slapstick..it's so far out that you gasp as you laugh." It reminds her of the great Preston Sturges pix.
On Fellini/ Antonioni: "Nothing seems more shallow than the dissatisfaction of the enervated rich; nothing is easier to attack."
On "The Cousins" : Here's "Chabrol's almost extravagant command of the medium."
On "West Side Story" : Boobs and wiseguys, she asserts, try to impress with their seriousness. When the always ...more
Kael on "Lolita" (Kubrick) : "A black slapstick..it's so far out that you gasp as you laugh." It reminds her of the great Preston Sturges pix.
On Fellini/ Antonioni: "Nothing seems more shallow than the dissatisfaction of the enervated rich; nothing is easier to attack."
On "The Cousins" : Here's "Chabrol's almost extravagant command of the medium."
On "West Side Story" : Boobs and wiseguys, she asserts, try to impress with their seriousness. When the always ...more
Whether Pauline Kael is singing the praises of Satyajit Ray, or cutting Alain Resnais down to size, she is, without question, the real deal, a true American iconoclast. Fuck, even when I disagree with her (really, how can she hate La Dolce Vita?) I'm immensely, immensely charmed. Like Fran Lebowitz, I could happily sit down at a party while she held court over cigarette after cigarette, and went through the failings of everyone in the room and a significant number of people outside of it. Unfort
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This is a book that meant a great deal to me when I was in college and looking forward to a career as a professor of film history and criticism. (It never happened, but that is a long story.)
As Assistant Director of the Dartmouth College Film Society, I was present when Pauline Kael visited the campus in my senior year and had dinner and an interesting conversation with our tiny film community. By then, she had already published I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965, and I had read ...more
As Assistant Director of the Dartmouth College Film Society, I was present when Pauline Kael visited the campus in my senior year and had dinner and an interesting conversation with our tiny film community. By then, she had already published I Lost it at the Movies: Film Writings, 1954-1965, and I had read ...more
My copy of "I Lost it at the Movies" is itself a tribute to my love of Ms. Kael's writing: purchased when I was a teenager, the binding has come apart completely so often has it been opened, and what was once a book is now just a stack of loose sheets of paper. To read it one must pick up each individual sheet from the right-hand stack of papers, read it, turn it over, read that, then place the sheet atop the opposite left-hand stack. I will not - I cannot - part with it; it is one of the buildi
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Pauline Kael wrote masterful prose in the service of the flickering world we see on the screen. Not shy with her opinions, there's rarely a dull moment. Agree or disagree, but hear her out. It's worth it!
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Kael’s problem isn’t that she’s a contrarian, but that she’s obsessed with the lonely, vigilante allure of being a contrarian (i.e. the madness that has overtaken Armond White). This makes for criticism that’s generally less constructive and illuminating than monomaniacally obsessed with pointing out why everyone else is wrong, with dissecting why movies are terrible without giving them much of a fair shake, jumping to conclusions and dismissing viewpoints with maniacal abandon. She obviously ha
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There's no doubt Pauline KAEL has a fancy way of saying things. But what she says is far from being fancy. I mean, I took this book because I thought it's about movies, but I've found out that it's about people watching the movies. Every "review" of her started by criticizing mass or intellectual reception, or criticizing others reviews. Paul Kael is in continuous reaction to the people's reaction to movies. So it seems to me that she just hates movies that are particularly praised by intellectu
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"She has everything that a great critic needs except judgment. And I don’t mean that facetiously." One of the great lines by Woody Allen on Kael.
And he is quite right. She knows a lot about the history and art of movies. Unfortunately, she suffers from the everything was better in the past syndrome. Which means up to the thirties. She writes this one, her first collection of criticism in the sixties. Birds? Bad. West Side Story? She hates it.
And she prefers foreign movies. But slashes Marienbad ...more
And he is quite right. She knows a lot about the history and art of movies. Unfortunately, she suffers from the everything was better in the past syndrome. Which means up to the thirties. She writes this one, her first collection of criticism in the sixties. Birds? Bad. West Side Story? She hates it.
And she prefers foreign movies. But slashes Marienbad ...more
Some movie notices by a little known scribe from Petaluma...
I cant wait to read more of her work.
My favorite film critic of all time wrote some of the greatest and most perceptive critiques ever. Even when you disagreed, you learned an idea from Kael about the topic. ❤️
I have always been a great admirer of Kael's film criticism, even while most of the time I didn't agree with her. There is something about her writing that even while she dislikes a film and will bluntly just say that she dislikes movies that others consider good or even great, she enjoys the act of experiencing the picture and talking about them. I also love how she often will gauge the reactions of an audience around her, even mentioning comments by people made during the viewing. Gauging audi
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I Lost It At The Movies is the first book of criticism by iconic film critic Pauline Kael. It has lots of food for thought throughout, and has inspired me to see some classics. many of the films from this era were unfamiliar to me, but several of her essays are thought provoking as well and reflect the tenor of the times. The book is divided into four sections, and the first "Broadsides" had a couple of interesting essays-"The Glamour of Delinquency" (in which she discusses On The Waterfront, Ea
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Of the great film critics, Kael has probably aged the worst. Otis Ferguson, James Agee and Andrew Sarris still retain much of their felicity. Kael, on the other hand, seems capricious, stubborn and willfully inconsistent. Her prose style is wonderful, and her writing has wonderful personality, but her judgments are unfair, and her pieces are instances of performance art. Criticism's is a second order genre. It is about something else. The ideal critic has to have a certain passivity, and a willi
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the late, great Pauline Kael. This is a collection of her early, pre-New Yorker, writings about film. I have always been a Pauline Kael fan. I love the way she writes about movies -- even when I don't agree with her, or have no idea what she's talking about, it makes me excited about film and I find myself wanting to watch Last Year at Marienbad again (which normally is the kind of idea that should make you say OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, NO.) just to see particular things she is talking about. All of
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This has been fun. Since it's a collection of reviews and essays, I can pick it up and read part and put it down later, which makes it perfect for reading in-between all the books I have to read for class. She's a really great writer, so it's enjoyable even when I don't agree with her. She is fantastically bitchy when she doesn't like a movie, and doesn't hold back (she's also pretty snarky about other critics' opinions, and doesn't hesitate to call them stupid if she thinks they are), so that's
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Pauline Kael's reviews were a revelation; here was someone who could write insightfully, bring in current and past events, make connections, write a thesis (my downfall) and present it persuasively. When I ask friends why they like or don't like a book or movie, I really want to know if their ideas and connections I'm missing, how the elements of a movie cohere to convey the story or ideas. Kael taught me to better appreciate a film, provided perspective, delved into themes and ideas, and her wr
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Ms. Kael was a fine writer. Her reviews and opinions are wry, engaging and clear evidence of an educated mind at work. There is no doubt she loved the cinema down to her very bones. Had I seen a few of the more important art house films focused on in this volume prior to reading her criticisms, I might have taken more away from her perspective. Still, they were worth reading for the philosophical content alone.
Even though I found Ms Kael to be very intelligent I found her to also be quit cruel in some of her reviews. I know that film critics are allowed to be cynical, snippy, and/or egotistic but in some of her reviews she seemed to go a little beyond that! The whole book was just too bitter for me.
Some good stuff, but I'm afraid I found my attention wandering at times. A bit heavy for me.
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Kael really is something else. So many have tried to imitate her but no one had the same elegance and bite. I don't always agree with her, but even when I don't she's a joy to read.
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I've been reading these reviews while ticking off movies from the era, hoping to get a sense of what it was like to see these films as they came out. But Pauline Kael is fascinating in her own right: she is simultaneously the most intelligent and puzzling critic I've ever come across. Her reviews feel like they fall into two categories, which in my mind have to be written by two different Pauline Kaels.
The first Kael -- Light Kael -- writes these incredibly nuanced, incredibly humane essays that ...more
The first Kael -- Light Kael -- writes these incredibly nuanced, incredibly humane essays that ...more
When I was reading Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, or reading her capsule reviews of older movies, I thought I liked her. But after reading an entire book of her early pieces, I'm not so sure. She has a gruff and combative tone, constantly harping against other critics, that is off-putting. She also seems to have no consistent critical standards; she loves L'Avventura and hates Last Year at Marienbad and I can't quite figure out why--though I like her point about being bored watching filmmakers
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As someone who's written a lot of criticism but sometimes wonders what the point of it all is, Kael's description of the purpose of the critic in her takedown of auteur theory -- that critics are meant to "help people see what is in a work, what is in it that shouldn't be, and what is not in it that could be" and that this if done well this can "excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there" -- really struck me, especially in an era where the role of critics has bee
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This took me a loooong time to get through. Kael’s writing style is still (mostly) gripping but the time period this covers means that most - if not all - of her pop culture references are so long ago I didn’t recognize them. But even without full familiarity with the movies and directors she’s referencing there is still a lot to be gleaned from the way she writes, which it seems is almost always angrily!
“It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that ...more
“It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with his good; it indicates that ...more
Worth reading for the degree to which Kael’s personality (which I enjoy) comes through, but ultimately I found it really difficult to understand the context of a time in cinema that I’m only glancingly familiar with - or even a broader cultural context which feels more than a few critical moments ago. Maybe best as a resource for some of the specific films covered, many of which I now need to see.
Finding this book in a free book bin and reading it renewed my interest in film. Kael watches and writes like a critic without method but with plenty of opinion and lots of brilliant flashes. I don’t know if I could have picked the book up in any place and enjoyed it as much without having read an early and lucid chapter about her interest in story first--as opposed to character. That chapter set what followed up well. I was especially taken by the section on Satyajit Ray films, which coincided
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Classic case of style over substance. The U.S. provincialism is nauseating. When are we getting the collected criticism of Molly Haskell, dammit?? You're better off reading Manny Farber and, yes, Andy Sarris.
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undid some of my prejudices. she's rather brilliant. but still problematic
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One of the greats. I really miss her writing. 😕
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Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. She was known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated, and sharply focused" movie reviews. She approached movies emotionally, with a strongly colloquial writing style. She is often regarded as the most influential American film critic of her day and made a lasting impression on other major critics
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