Hooked

by Pauline Kael

Book Overview

The longtime "New Yorker" film critic gathers more than 175 movie reviews in this collection, covering releases from the period July 1985 to June 1988 This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525484299
• ISBN13: 9780525484295
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: Plume Books
• Length: 510 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.

Customer Reviews

get Hooked

This is Pauline Kael's ninth collection (and eleventh book) and it covers her film reviews from The New Yorker magazine from July 1985 to June 1988. In her author's note she claims that the period begins lamely then suddenly there's one marvellous movie after another. The films she praises here include Secret Honor (she has long been an Altman fan), Dreamchild, Under Fire, My Beautiful Laundrette, Blue Velvet, Something Wild, The Stepfather, Prick up your Ears, The Dead, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The ones she pans include Cocoon, the notorious Heaven's Gate, Year of the Dragon, The Color Purple, Shoah, Revolution, Platoon, Ishtar, Ironweed, and Empire of the Sun. She also reviews 2 books - Paul Coates' The Story of the Lost Reflection and Katharine Hepburn's The Making of The African Queen. As always, she can make me laugh. Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided. There's a price to be paid for being likeable in a TV series week after week, year after year: the only thing that can save Alan Alda now is to play bastards or weirdos, preferably in a heavy disguise. It would take a board of enquiry made up of gods to determine whether this picture (Heartbreak Ridge) is more offensive aesthetically, psychologically, morally, or politically. And, I'll probably be chastised for being a woman finding fault with a war film, but I've probably seen as much combat as the men saying "This is how war is".