Hooked (book)

For other uses, see the book.

Hooked (1989) is the ninth collection of movie reviews by the critic Pauline Kael, covering the period from July 1985 to June 1988. All articles in the book originally appeared in The New Yorker.

She discusses more than 150 films giving rich praise to the work of directors and performers she admires - in this collection for example, Robert Altman, ("When he's working in top form there's nobody who can touch him. They can't even get near him.") - Alan Rudolph, Susan Sarandon, Lesley Ann Warren , ("one of the great beauties of the screen.") And cool to what she regards as second rate, here for example, George Lucas ("George Lucas should believe less in himself - he keeps trying to come up with an original idea, and he can't") , Michael J Fox (" approaches acting as a form of aerobics"), Clint Eastwood ("here he is playing a stiff, a ghost - it's perfect casting.")

Her trademark witty style pervades the collection, - the telling use of metaphor -" Robert Downey Jr., whose soul is floppy-eared..", - the jamming up of oppositions against each other to suggest the complexity of things - the deft undercutting of a word or statement by the following word or statement - ("She's an innocent, deeply conventional woman who loves being rudely awakened." "Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn't concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.")

The title refers to her film 'addiction'. "I got hooked on movies at an early age, (around 4 or 5 , when I saw them while sitting on my parents' laps), and I am still a child before a moving image. Movies seem to me the most mysteriously great of all art forms."

The book is out-of-print in the United States, but is still published by Marion Boyars Publishers in the United Kingdom.