Rene Bard’s Reviews > When the Lights Go Down: Film Writings, 1975-1980 > Status Update

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!]

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."

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."

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."

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?