Perhaps she should have sent that note of surrender to Wise after all. Kael’s editor at the time, Robert Stein, argued throughout his life that it wasn’t what did for her. At her best, Pauline Kael was everything a film critic should be: passionate, knowledgable, in love with the movies and writing about them, willing to defend her reviews, and vicious. Alternatively you can wallow in the film’s toothsome charms as the last gasp of the family-friendly studio musical before the climate changed and the genre went in darker directions. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (2019) Film criticism is not the same as a film review. Captain Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) and his family. The actor, director and producer discusses his latest project and reflects on his remarkably varied career. It was dismissed as a ‘sugar-coated lie’ by Pauline Kael – but The Sound of Music’s enduring success suggests audiences enjoy being manipulated. These women, who by this point had built up a comfortable rivalry, were temporarily bonded by their mutual hatred of Robert Wise’s Oscar-sweeping musical. Most of us watch the film first when we’re a child, and subsequently enjoy the ritual of its slowly unfolding plot and frequent song reprisals with the comfort of nostalgia – not for nothing was its first UK TV broadcast on Christmas Day. With five Oscars under its belt, legions of devoted fans including those prone to dressing up and singing along, and having taken so much box-office cash that it is in the top 10 highest-grossing films of all time, The Sound of Music is comfortably, and indisputably, a resounding hit. For Brand, Andrews alone is worth the price of admission. Pauline Kael Reviews A-Z. Kael thought that The Sound of Music fit the bill, predicting it would prove “the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom in movies for the next few years.” If Didion took issue with the film’s historical dishonesty, Kael spoke of a general “luxuriant falseness,” finding the combined effect of the wholesome story and high production value to be emotional manipulation. The songs, which have become part of the American musical lexicon, are immediately recognizable and, as Kael sarcastically acknowledged, eminently hummable. Or that they’ve been tricked.”. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews. She was a staff writer for a popular women’s magazine called McCall’s and also had a regular film column at Vogue. .'' Before long, she was writing cover articles and briefly became Vogue’s film critic. Many, people, including academic Stacy Wolf, read androgynous Maria as radiating “delicious queerness”. We believe in Truth & Movies. The film has only grown in prominence over the years, yet at the time of its release, the critical consensus was far from glowing. Didion and Kael would spar in alternating issues. Most famously, Pauline Kael called it “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat ... and this is the attitude that makes a critic feel that maybe it’s all hopeless. The Sound of Criticism Kael went to UC-Berkeley in 1936 and became an art-film maker and a movie exhibitor. You can either accept the artifice of ‘real’ people suddenly bursting into song and dance, or you can’t.” Shearer discerns a gender angle too, whether the critic in question is male or female: “There can be a tendency amongst critics to be particularly dismissive of musicals and of mainstream films that are coded as feminine in some way.”. Pauline Kael described the film as “the sugar-coated lie that people seem to want to eat”. It remains unclear what exactly inspired them to butt heads. It takes all sorts … The Greatest Showman proved a fan favourite. Both women enjoyed the notoriety of being so vicious in print that it cost them their livelihoods, but the truth is a lot more obscure than the legend suggests. , if only because there is also more than one way to watch the Sound Music! One of the pleasure of it, ” argues Shearer mojo on that taste, with a strongly colloquial style... For 70mm screening of the pleasure of it, ” argues Shearer,! 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