The Age of Movies
Why this book?
Pauline Kael, long time film critic for New Yorker magazine, brought to her reviews a combination of the visceral and the intellectual that I found absolutely delicious. For me, reading her was like eating a scrumptious meal. She was not afraid to employ rough colloquialisms; she understood, rightly, that they lent vitality and reality to writing. And she was conversational, often to the chagrin of the grammar-checkers at the magazine. She showed you could be smart and still talk like a regular person. She is still delicious to read, even though the movies aren’t currently playing. And she cracked open media criticism for the rest of us, making it possible to write seriously about Jaws and The Godfather and not just Ingmar Bergman. She also clearly loved sex in the movies, and talked about it frequently and vividly. In a then quite reserved magazine like the New Yorker, that was truly taboo-breaking.