Pauline Kael vs. cinematic sacred cows

Благодаря Свете узнал о легендарной Pauline Kael, которая писала кинорецензии для журнала New Yorker с 1960-х по 1980-е. Для нее не было ничего святого -- от европейского артхауса до голливудских блокбастеров, по зубам доставалось всем. Вот подборка особенно вкусных цитат из ее рецензий, из книги 5001 Nights at the Movies:

Blow-Up
When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality. He conducts a leisurely tour of "swinging" London, ligering over the flashiest routes and dawdling over a pot party and a mini-orgy, while ponderously suggesting that the mod scene represents a condition of spiritual malaise in which people live only for the sensations of the moment. Yet despite Antonioni's negativism, the world he presents looks harmless, and sex without "connecting" doesn't really seem so bad.

2001: A Space Odyssey
2001 is a movie that might have been made by the hero of Blow-Up, and it's fun to think about Kubrick really doing every dumb thing he wanted to do, building enormous science-fiction sets and equipment, never even bothering to figure out what he was going to do with them... 2001 is a celebration of cop-out. It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it's all out of your hands anyway. There's an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny all the way from ape to angel, so just follow the slab.

Barry Lyndon -- специально для sguez
Kubrick suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable. The film says that people are disgusting but things are lovely... It's a coffee-table movie; the stately tour of European high life is like a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.

The Graduate
How could you convince [kids who have gone to see The Graduate eight times] that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of work when they're so clearly in the market to buy innocence?

The Sound of Music
This is a tribute to freshness that is so mechanically engineered and so shrewdly calculated that the background music rises, the already soft focus blurs and melts, and, upon the instant, you can hear all those noses blowing in the theatre ... Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?

West Side Story
The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky.