"Taking It All In," Pauline Kael

I started reading Pauline Kael as a very young child, when I would pick up copies of "The New Yorker" in my parents' bedroom. The only things I could properly understand were the cartoons and the movie reviews. I'd like to say that this reading made a deep impression on me, and perhaps on some subconscious level it did, but consciously all I remember is snickering at a review of "Spanking the Monkey," which must have been published long after Kael retired. My first genuine contact with her film reviews was her first book, "I Lost it at the Movies," which I have read over and over, to the point where the cover is falling off and the pages are bent at the edges. ("Fantasies of the Art-House Audience" and "Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood" are some of the best take-downs of goopy Hollywood "liberalism" that I've read.)

It's hard to find Kael's longer reviews and essays, so when I ran across "Taking It All In," I snapped it up. The movies reviewed are from the early 80s, and I didn't find that the writing had the same snap as in her earlier works (Kael was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease around this time, although with essays like "Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, the Numbers", it could have just been sheer weariness at work). Nevertheless, there's a sense of pleasure in this book that's unmistakable, and Kael cares deeply about what she's reviewing in a way that you don't get with, say, David Denby (all right, I just want to bitch about David Denby).

A collection of Kael's capsule reviews.