Rene Bard > Recent Status Updates

p289 Paul has certainly not provided neat answers to the baffling questions which arise....He has...not swept away all the difficulties. But...we may well feel that he has given us enough to [know]...that the deep mystery p290 which surrounds us is neither a nightmare mystery of meaninglessness nor a dark mystery of arbitrary omnipotence but the mystery...of the altogether good and merciful and faithful God.

p411 "but he [screenwriter Marzursky] touches so many women's-liberation bases that you begin to feel virtuous, as if you'd been passing out leaflets for McGovern."

[Can vegetables feel virtuous?]

Reviewing Ridley Scott's "The Duellists", Kael's backhanded compliment comparing the imagery of his camera work to "...the sentences of a writer whose flow of feelings is richer than any explicit statement he can make" captures EXACTLY the reason why I enjoy her work. PK was a talented writer with a vast repertoire of movie knowledge but little-to-no process of logical assimilation, a fatuous Marxist intellectual.

p291-cont'd [about Star Wars] "In a gesture toward equality of the sexes, the high-school-cheerleader princess-in-distress talks tomboy-tough-Terry Moore with spunk. Is it because the picture is synthesized from the mythology of serials and old comic books that it didn't occur to anybody that she could get The Force?"

[Kudos to Kael, using her caustic tone, for guessing that Princess Leia might have The Force.]

p291 Star Wars is "a film that's totally uninterested in anything that doesn't connect with the mass audience. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism....Even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension–a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream. But it's probably the absence of wonder that accounts for the film's special, huge success."

yup, Ms. Kael said that.

p284"He [Richard Baskin] sings like someone trying to play the double bass who doesn't know how; the quavering anal growl on the sound track might be Kissinger serenading NBC"

[lol! Brutal, Pauline, brutal!]

dnf

p182"Theyre silly,yet theyre no sillier than the people I know in Berkeley,who are probably the brightest people I know.In life,bright
people can bore one senseless..and so it's a giddy surprise to discover how charming they are here on the screen.When this..movie gets its group of eight linked up..and Jonah the savior is born out of the whale of the old society.This is an Easter fable..but with a dialectical bunny."

p167 "...a good-girl artist is a contradiction in terms." [about the movie Sparkle]

p179"America at the Movies represents the potentates' scrubbed-up side and the establishment status they aspired to. They were tough men;they lived a long time,and their strength is reflected in their movies-which still have money in them,because they still have life in them.What those men did will literally influence mankind forever.It's a worldwide culture (virus?) that can't be destroyed-perhaps the first."

p146 [about verse 6:23] "God...does not pay wages, since no man can put Him in his debt."

p90 "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one hell of a good film, but it works emotionally only because of its story and acting; it lacks the excitement of movie art."

p72"Since the only thing about reviewing movies that makes me unhappy is that I can't get to the opera often enough,Ingmar Bergman's film version of The Magic Flute is a blissful present....[p76]His cutting to the reactions of that princessy little girl,whom one wants to strangle,suggests that the production is designed to introduce opera to children....[which] devalues the opera and what he has done with it."

p89cont'd"Since the objection to the presence of this Greek word on the ground of the sense of the passage is thus confirmed by the thoroughly objective fact of its inconsistency with the grammar of the sentence (a point not often noticed), it would seem that we are justified in regarding it as a simple mistake,whether of a very early copyist or of Tertius or of Paul himself, and ignoring it in translation."

p89"A puzzling feature of v.[4:]12 is...the definite article before the Greek word...[for] 'walk', which has the effect of implying a different group of people altogether from that just mentioned is intended. But this in not only contrary to...the clear sense of the sentence; it is also ruled out grammatically by the position of the previous definite article...in relation to the words represented by 'not' and 'only'.

"what I am experiencing is The Flip..a change in power..occurred and neither of us realized [it]..it happens in relationship[s] that fail[s]..Jen..wouldnt leave me alone in the very beginning..[3 1/2 mo. later], something shifted.I became the person who was more interested..She became the manager of Us–I would ask..she would grant..Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least."

p52 "The film [The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser] is a double fable – intermingling the deadening effects of bourgeois society and the cruelty of the universe."

Hey, Pauline (R.I.P.), what might you have said about the "deadening effects" & cruelty of implemented Marxism which slaughtered over 100 million people in the 20th century?

Appendix p29 of 1864 version: "I owe nothing to Protestantism; and I spoke against it even when I was an Anglican"

p324 1864 version:"speaking historically of what I held in 1843-33,I say,that I believed in a God...in Christianity...in Catholicism on a probability(P),and that all three were about the same kind of P,a cumulative,a transcendent P,but still P;inasmuch as He who made us,has so willed that in mathematics indeed we arrive at certitude(C) by rigid demonstration,but in religious inquiry we arrive at C by accumulated Ps"

p462 "Cabaret found a solution to the happy-equals-square problem: it worked on electricity and wit, which made us [the cool people] happy."

p462 "Cabaret is about living in the moment, Weimar being a
metaphor for a futureless society."

p454 "Lemmon, who isn't Jewish, plays Jews who aren't Jewish, either.
He's cast as a Jew for the same reason Montgomery Clift was after the
accident that disfigured him - because the look in his face passes for
pain. It is pain, but it's the wrong kind - suggesting a mixture of dissipation,
grogginess, gutlessness."

p428 "And maybe because he [the director Richards] looks to see what's in people's faces he brought something out of Alan Arkin, instead of letting Arkin put it there."

p365 "...there's a fagged out joke about Nixon, and later an angry blast at the media to balance it."
[Kael comments on the film "Airport 1975"]

book3chapter3 O'Brien tells Winston Why? the Party "clings to power" like it does: "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power.
...
The object of power is power."