Eight More from Kael

 

Yojimbo

• The soggiest humanitarian sentiments need not have had confirmation in the movies- said Kael.
• The kinesthetical response to the action was overwhelming. The action was so thoroughly and outrageously bloody that it got to a hilarious kind of style. It was a glorious comedy. The comic and exhilarating extreme violence didn't sicken you.
• Movies needed to have their concepts of heroism overturned.

 

The Wild One

• A news story became a nightmare on the screen. Then the misunderstood boy meets girl.
• The postwar lust for security got countered by Brando. He had his instincts. Society was crap and he knew it. He was strong enough not to take the crap.

 

Blackboard Jungle

• The youth center's activities did not negate the violence of delinquency. The delinquents weren't mistaken about being suspicious of psychiatric tinged social workers and teachers.
• The violence of delinquents had garnered headlines and Blackboard Jungle's creators wanted a traumatic structure gotten from a social problem drama. Police were called into theaters to quell the reactions to the violence of Blackboard Jungle. It was a violence that meant more than relief from a boring plot.
• The why for the violence was not sought. The boys had their codes, leaders, and gangs. They rejected society. Some persons reacted by putting it down to mixed-up kids. They still wanted the boys with them, within society.
• "...as yet, we have no social or political formulations that use indifference toward prosperity and success as a starting point for new commitments."

 

Hud

• In an America confused about enjoying prosperity, Hud was to be an indictment of materialism. It wasn't to lean on hokum, glamor, romance, tempo, and invoke a feeling for a place by means of the rhythm in and of a slick style.
• The misunderstood son pursues wives and attempts what could have been a ritual rape of the "white Negro" housekeeper. She invited "rape" and could have been grateful for his breaking down her resistance.
• The gunmen (the Nazis) shot the cows (the Jews). Kael's socialist friends couldn't accept cops if there was a necessary shoot but their government was to integrate schools and stop discrimination in housing while splintering the CIA that killed JFK.
• Her father had been adulterous and a Republican. He was also generous, kind, and a Western democrat not understood by Easterners.

 

Blowup

• Kael saw Marcel Marceau appreciated by an audience that applauded itself for its own appreciation of art. She preferred the Ritz Brothers. So Marceau was to the Ritz Brothers as Blowup was to movies that she liked.
• Blowup's peculiar slugged conscious was desired and became a personal matter to too many people. So what if it is sex without connection - naughty but nice? Easy sex doesn't mean an empty life.
• Movies of the past could make drama exciting and possible even if the protagonists were shallow and venal. Those movies did it without heavy symbolism standing in for self-importance.
• The photographer was an anti-hero. Thirty-eight people did not call the police in the Kitty Genovese case. Anti-humanism was so defined? Blowup had a complaint to register about dehumanization but it was carried out in a dehumanized way.

 

The Godfather

• The worst in America was its feudal ruthlessness.
• Organized crime was an obscene symbolic part of unleashed free enterprise and unbridled government economic policy.

 

Nashville

• She never loved a movie more. It was the ultimate Altman.
• Wild metaphors were filmed. The lonely degraded failures of an entire group of the poor turned into groupies.
• The movie was the funniest epic about America. It was exhilarating to feel a part of the life Altman showed you.

 

Last Tango in Paris

• The male of the movie had masculine pride and aggression and obscene debasement as reality. The female of the movie carried the whole history of movie passion in her long legs and a baby face of the bourgeois.
• Feelings about the sex scenes were unresolved. Nevertheless, the film was utterly beautiful to look at.
• It was the breakthrough. Finally emotional violence had been committed in the most erotic movie ever made. It could also become the most liberating movie ever made.