Taking It All In

Taking It All In is the seventh collection of movie reviews by the critic Pauline Kael and contains the 150 film reviews she wrote for The New Yorker between June 9 1980, and June 13 1983. She writes in the Author's Note at the beginning of the collection that, "it was a shock to discover how many good ones there were", as well as observing that only a very few of the movies she liked were box-office successes - E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Tootsie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. She laments that, "in the '80s, films that aren't immediate box-office successes are instantly branded as losers, flops, bombs. Some of the movies that meant the most to me were in this doomed group - The Stunt Man, Pennies from Heaven, Blow Out, The Devil's Playground, Melvin and Howard, Shoot the Moon, Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean".

The collection starts up after a gap of a year, part of which Kael spent in Los Angeles and what she learned during those months is summed up in the piece Why Are Movies So Bad? This essay, (in which she takes on the Hollywood money men whose love of swift and easy financial returns she believed led to the too many truly bad films on show at the time), is also included in the collection.

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

Movies reviewed

• The Shining - "Again and again, the movie leads us to expect something - almost promises it - and then disappoints us."
• Brubaker - "You're held by this movie, even when you're arguing with it, because there's power in the subject and in many of the performances.."
• The Blues Brothers - "Getting Aretha Franklin into The Blues Brothers was the smartest thing the director, John Landis, did; letting her get away after that one number - (she sings 'Think') - was the dumbest."
• The Blue Lagoon - "Watching them, (Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins), is about as exciting as looking into a fishbowl waiting for guppies to mate."
• Urban Cowboy - "Much of the time Bud (John Travolta), is slackjawed and uncouth; then he has a speech explaining that he isn't dumb - and I think we're meant to take him at his word - because he has 'feelings'. Of course we think he's dumb: James Bridges and Aaron Latham have written him dumb. Worse, they've written him weak."
• Dressed to Kill - "Brian De Palma knows where to put the camera and how to make every move count, and his timing is so great that when he wants you to feel something he gets you every time. It's hardly possible to find a point at which you could tear yourself away from this picture." "What makes Dressed To Kill funny is that it's permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts."
• Honeysuckle Rose - "The music and the imagery move together. Jerry Schatzberg, who used to be a photographer, makes the people - all of them - look beautiful, in a special, transparent way. This isn't a picture with extras dressed up in somebody's idea of what Texas peasants wear. You feel that you're seeing regional Americans as they are, without awkwardness on their part. The color is realistic, yet so joyful it's almost hallucinatory."
• Willie & Phil - "This movie is a little monument to screwed-up notions of what women are."
• Airplane! -"The three writer-directors keep the gags coming pop pop pop..."
• The Great Santini - "warmed over and plodding"
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Special Edition - "I wish that Steven Spielberg had trusted his first instincts and left Close Encounters of the Third Kind as it was..the slightly different outtakes that Spielberg has substituted for the shots you remember keep jarring you."
• The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith - "The movie is about the cultural chasm that divides the natives and the European-spawned whites..The smooth high-strung tone is set right at the start, and I don't think there's an inexpressive frame of film in the entire movie."
• The Getting of Wisdom - "Having been through so many men's coming-of-age literary autobiographies on film, do we have to plow through the same tediousness with women? We always know the end: they go off to write the book."
• The Stunt Man - "Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross may be as definitive a caricature of a visionary movie director as John Barrymore's Oscar Jaffe in Twentieth Century was of theatrical genius."
• Those Lips, Those Eyes - " This picture wears its love of theatre like a shroud...it is every bit as tacky and enervated as the productions that are being staged."
• Melvin and Howard - " An almost flawless act of sympathetic imagination. I doubt if Jason Robards has ever been greater than he is here. Jonathan Demme shows perhaps a finer understanding of lower-middle-class life than any other American director."
• Ordinary People - " an academic exercise in catharsis; it's earnest, it means to improve people, and it lasts a lifetime."
• The Elephant Man - "John Hurt, using his twisted lips and his eyes, but mostly his voice and his posture and movements, makes of Merrick an astonishingly sweet-souled gentleman of his era."
• Stardust Memories - "In a Newsweek cover story in 1978, Woody Allen was quoted: 'When you do comedy you're not sitting at the grown-ups' table, you're sitting at the children's table.'.... Comedy doesn't belong at the children's table, but whining does."
• Private Benjamin - "Goldie Hawn demonstrates what an accomplished comedienne she is - she carries Private Benjamin on her back."
• Divine Madness! - "Bette Midler - like a Betty Hutton with brains."
• Used Cars - " has a wonderful, energetic heartlessness. Its premise is that honesty doesn't exist. Everybody in the movie is funny - even Toby, Luke's dog. Used Cars is a classic screwball fantasy - a shaggy celebration of American ingenuity."
• Every Man for Himself - "Godard's political extremism has been replaced by a broader extremism - total contempt shaded by masochism. This film says that we don't care about him, nobody cares about anybody, and he has given up on us."
• Raging Bull - "Scorsese loves the visual effects and the powerful melodramatic moments of movies such as Body and Soul, The Set-Up, and Golden Boy. He makes this movie out of remembered high points, leaping from one to another."
• Heaven's Gate - " a numbing shambles."
• The Idolmaker - "Taylor Hackford doesn't work up an indignant head of steam about unscrupulous promoters who exploit teen-agers' sexual fantasies - he sees the comedy in it."
• Resurrection - "The director, Daniel Petrie, does some very polished, fluid work, but you're always aware of the planning and calculation. Mysticism doesn't come easy to him."
• Popeye - "The picture seems overcomplicated, cluttered, and the familiar Popeye phrases and situations barely emerge. Shelley Duvall's an original who has her own limpid way of doing things..takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit into it. Duvall may be the closest thing we've ever come to a female Buster Keaton."
• Flash Gordon - " a piece of comic-strip bravura...the shots are like the comic-strip frames enlarged by Lichtenstein, with the addition of crude, bright skyscapes. The whole movie is painterly."
• Altered States - "it's a bellicose head horror movie, probably the most aggressively silly picture since The Exorcist. Ken Russell doesn't seem to have the ability to create believable representations of human behaviour; The attraction of the film is in its psychedelic sound-and-light shows.."
• The Competition -" as the silver-haired maestro of the symphony orchestra that performs with the finalists, Sam Wanamaker tucks the picture in his vest pocket and struts away with it. Wanamaker shows up Amy Irving and Richard Dreyfus by not tearing himself apart in anguish over whether we'll like him."
• Tess - " This Tess isn't a protagonist; she is merely a hapless,frail creature, buffeted by circumstances. The picture is tame, it's artistic - a series of leisurely Barbizon School landscapes. Roman Polanski's Tess is Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles under sedation."
• Kagemusha - "The film doesn't seem contemplative - just uninvolving and spiritless."
• Napoléon - "Abel Gance has a nineteenth century theatrical sensibility, but he's also obsessed with the most avant-garde film techniques, and he uses these advanced methods to overpower you emotionally. You applaud, you cheer, because the exhilaration of his technique freshens the stale, trashy ideas, gives them a grand lunacy."
• Fort Apache, The Bronx - Paul Newman throws himself into the role of Murphy, a veteran of eighteen years on the New York police force..There's no star self-protectiveness, no holding back; He has fun with who he is in a scene; he dances, he shuffles. Theres a beautiful hamminess about his work: he's scratching an itch and getting a huge kick out of it." " the movie is an attempt to show urban crisis in extremis "
• All Night Long - "is an idiosyncratic, fairy-tale comedy about people giving up the phony obligations they have accumulated and trying to find a way to do what they enjoy " " The director Jean-Claude Tramont, is a sophisticated jokester. There may be a suggestion of Lubitsch and of Max Ophuls in his approach,and there is more than a suggestion of Tati"; - "Gene Hackman gives one of his most likable performances."
• Caddie - " The lovely toothy Helen Morse is the heroine of the 1976 Australian movie Caddie, which has just opened here..The picture often has the charm of photographs of the past, but that's all it has. It doesn't dramatize..Jack Thompson's brash, flippant [bookie] Ted, gives the film a burst of energy."
• The Incredible Shrinking Woman - " a light, satirical fantasy starring Lily Tomlin..Even after Pat (Tomlin) starts to shrink, she tries to see the bright side of things. She goes on valiantly shopping and cooking, even when she has to climb up to the sink...Its an amiable sloppy film."
• Nine to Five - " this piece of strong-arm whimsy..is a leering, doddering movie.."
• La Cage aux Folles II - "as Albin, the female impersonator star of a gay night-club revue, Michel Serrault doesn't make the mistake of acting like a woman - he acts Albin like a transvestite's idea of a woman - he is obsessed with how he looks, and is terified of aging - that is, of no longer being loved. He's a heavyset middle-aged man trying to be a sex goddess in chiffon "
• The Dogs of War - "Without anything being made explicit, the film indicates that it's more than money that impels these mercenaries to fight..This is the first feature by John Irvin [and he] has studied a master; some of the most feral images are almost direct quotations from Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch."
• Eyewitness - "Just about no one is believable in this movie. Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich have put an eighties woman into a claptrap forties-movie situation. Eyewitness is moderately enjoyable to watch, but when you think about it, it gets weirder and worse."
• Atlantic City - " Burt Lancaster plays Lou, an old-timer who tries to keep up appearances; when Lancaster was working with Visconti or Bertolucci he wasn't afraid to be bloody and bowed. And thats how he is here, but more so, because this time he isn't playing a strong man brought down by age and social changes: he's a man who was never anything much ..Louis Malle has entered into the writer John Guare's way of seeing, and depth of feeling - [which is] what Lancaster, in the finest performance he has ever given..brings to the film."
• The Postman Always Rings Twice - " overcontrolled..the period detail makes it look studied and accurate, when whats wanted is impulsiveness and haste..Jessica Lange stands and walks with her rump out proudly, and it dominates the movie."
• Excalibur - " I would never have imagined that I could enjoy a retelling of the Arthurian legends which was soaked in Jung and scored to themes from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Wagner, but John Boorman's Excalibur has its own kind of crazy integrity."
• Thief - "Thief is all highfalutin hype..There's so much of the rainy-night-in-the-neon-city school of cinematography that the picture is close to being a parody of film noir....This is the first theatrical feature by the writer-director Michael Mann."
• The Howling - "The Howling doesn't take itself seriously, it's consciously trashy. The picture isn't afraid of being silly - which is its chief charm."
• Caveman - "Carl Gottlieb shows a veteran entertainer's gift for pacing... an original, consistently enjoyable comedy. If you've been searching for a comedy you can enjoy along with your children, this is the one."
• Knightriders - " the picture has a core of very crude, easy social satire, and an even cruder social message...there's no film craft, no kinetic drama in the hurtling bodies; its just an exhibition of stunt work..[It] isn't offensive; it's simpleminded, though, and inept."
• Dawn of the Dead - " just a gross-out "
• This is Elvis - " We witness the transformation of a young whirlwind performer into a bloated druggie with dead eyes...This Is Elvis is hair-raising because of what Elvis turns into: joyless stardom gives him the look of a mutant."
• Heartworn Highways - " an informal documentary about performers such as Guy Clark, David Allan Coe, Townes Van Zandt, and Steve Young - part of the seventies outlaw generation of country music - there are wonderful things in it, such as an image of car lights serpentining on a highway under a full moon.."
• Raiders of the Lost Ark - " an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer - for flash...It gets your heart thumping. But there's no exhileration in this dumb, motor excitement."
• Cattle Annie and Little Britches - " based on the lives of two adolescent girls in the late 19th century who became infatuated with the Western outlaw heroes they had read about in Ned Buntline's stories and left their homes to join them. There is everything here to make a classic comedy-Western except a script to give the potentially rich material shape and a dramatic centre." "Burt Lancaster looks happy in this movie and still looks tough: it's an unbeatable combination."
• History of the World, Part 1 - " an all-out assault on taste and taboo, and it made me laugh a lot."
• Outland - " is set in a morally grimy future..[it] recalls another hermetic sci-fi film - the somewhat more spirited Alien...it has a comparable grinding unpleasantness."
• Dragonslayer - " draws us into the mysterious world that it creates. It's a night bloom...Ralph Richardson's Ulrich is like a batty,drunken old Shakespearean actor; his Latin spells have a poignant lilt..Alex North's score is a beauty..."
• Superman II - "Christopher Reeve..brings emotional depth to Superman..It's largely his love for Lois Lane and his sense of responsibility toward her (and the whole country) which give this film its jokey yet touching romanticism."
• Stripes - "The picture is not an aesthetic object; its just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy..But it has a lot of snappy lines, Ivan Reitman keeps things hopping.."
• Blow Out - "De Palma has sprung to the place..where genre is transcended and what we're moved by is an artist's vision. And Travolta makes his own leap - right back to the top where he belongs...Travolta and Nancy Allen are radiant performers..Nancy Allen gives the film its soul; Travolta gives it gravity and weight and passion...It's a great movie."
• Arthur - "is about a drunken millionaire playboy; it harks back to the screwball comedies of the thirties, but its attitudes are vaguely contemporary...Considering that Arthur..is a very thin comic construct, Dudley Moore does an amazing amount with the role. Arthur has a mad sparkle in his eyes and there's always something bubbling inside him.."
• Zorro, the Gay Blade - " a joyously silly farce "
• Mommie Dearest - "Faye Dunaway gives a startling, ferocious performance. She becomes as grim and harsh as the actual Joan Crawford was .."
• The French Lieutenant's Woman - " For the movie version of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman to set our imaginations buzzing, the one essential is that the distraught heroine, Sarah Woodruff, who keeps a vigil on the stone jetty of an English seacoast village in 1867 and, motionless, looks out to the gray sea, must be alluringly mysterious...We never really get into the movie, because, as Sarah, Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance, but she isn't mysterious."
• So Fine - " Andrew Bergman, and his cinematographer James A. Contner seem to have only one thought: to get a reaction from us... This picture works too hard at being funny..."
• True Confessions -" the idea is to take the lovable Irish brothers of thirties films - James Cagney and Pat O'Brien are the protytypes - and turn them inside out..The movie is in a stupor; you have to put up a struggle to get anything out of it."
• Chariots of Fire -" The effects calculated to make your spirits soar are the same effects that send you soaring down to the supermarket to buy a six-pack of Miller or Schlitz or Löwenbräu. The film is full to bursting with the impersonal, manufactured go-to-the-mountains poetry that sells products. It's retrograde moviemaking, presented with fake bravura."
• Rich and Famous - "Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen can't dip into themselves and bring out characters; they're simply art objects rattling off lines, and they rattle incessantly in this remake of the 1943 film Old Acquaintance, which starred Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins."
• Pixote - " As the director, Hector Babenco, sees it, there's something essential missing in Pixote; no one has ever made him feel that his life had any value...Babenco is wildly ambitious, in the manner of gifted young artists:... After I saw Pixote, I had an oppportunity to speak with Babenco, and since the street kids in the movie are all boys, I asked, "What of the girls?" His answer was "Their lives are ten thousand times as bad."
• Looker - " Albert Finney gives what looks to be the laziest performance by a star ever recorded on film. Boredom seems to have seeped into his muscles and cells; he's sinking under the weight of it...Thinking about this movie could give you frostbite of the brain."
• Continental Divide - "..there's a single plot thread,.. with almost no subsidiary characters..There's no subtext, either - just nothingness, with this tidy, old-fashioned structure laid on top of it."
• Body Heat - " William Hurt..gives his least entertaining screen performance yet. I never thought that I'd compare anyone unfavourably with Fred MacMurray, but MacMurray in Double Indemnity made a better chump."
• Southern Comfort - " a survival-game movie - a variation on The Most Dangerous Game and Deliverance in which almost defenceless men who manage to lose their compass in the water, along with their map and their radio, become the prey of hunters. Walter Hill uses the Louisiana bayou country locale for its paranoia inducing strangeness (its like a landscape dreamed up by Max Ernst)...As an action director, Walter Hill has a dazzling competence."
• Ticket to Heaven
• Ragtime
• The Devil's Playground
• On Golden Pond
• Pennies from Heaven
• Reds - "When Warren Beatty (as John Reed), and Diane Keaton (as Louise Bryant), drop a bit of political information, their voices go dead, as if they didn't expect anyone to be listening. Beatty could be reciting from a manual, and Keaton might be dubbed - the words don't seem related to anything going on in her head."
• Four Friends
• My Dinner with André
• Absence of Malice
• Shoot the Moon - " there isn't a scene in Alan Parker's new film , that I think rings false....This movie isn't just about marriage; it's about the family that is created, and how that whole family reacts to the knotted, disintegrating relationship of the parents...Alan Parker directs the actors superbly."
• One from the Heart
• The Border
• Personal Best
• Quest for Fire - " Only one pleasant thing happens to the three Ulam ( Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Nameer El-Kadi), on their travels: they encounter Ika (Rae Dawn Chong), of the highly developed mud-pople tribe, the Ivaka...who wears nothing but body paint."
• Missing
• Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man
• Three Brothers
• Diner
• Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip
• Deathtrap
• Diva
• Victor/Victoria - "Julie Andrews is too infuriatingly sane and remote to be at the center of a farce."
• Cat People
• Mephisto - " an indictment of a morally bankrupt actor - Klaus Maria Brandauer, who has gleaming cat eyes and a seductive, impish smile, seems a startlingly right choice for the part.."
• Smash Palace
• Annie
• Rocky III
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Poltergeist
• The Escape Artist
• Star Trek II:The Wrath of Khan
• Blade Runner
• A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
• Author! Author!
• Barbarosa
• The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
• The World According to Garp
• An Officer and a Gentleman
• The Road Warrior
• Tempest
• Night Shift - " the film picks up at the end, and there are a lot of attractive performers - especially the one-time Second City comedienne Shelley Long."
• My Favorite Year
• Tex
• Le Beau Mariage
• Fitzcarraldo
• Burden of Dreams
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High
• Sweet Hours
• Jinxed!
• Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
• Leap Into the Void
• By Design
• Eating Raoul
• Heartaches
• Still of the Night
• Tootsie
• Gandhi
• Sophie's Choice
• 48 Hrs.
• The Verdict
• Coup de Torchon
• Best Friends
• The Night of the Shooting Stars
• The Year of Living Dangerously
• The King of Comedy
• Lovesick
• Local Hero
• Tales of Ordinary Madness
• La Nuit de Varennes
• Say Amen, Somebody - " features Thomas A. Dorsey, (he composed Take My Hand, Precious Lord), - George T. Nierenberg, the young filmmaker, is a very sensitive and talented documentarian, and this is a lovely piece of work, but he's too genteel for his subject."
• Bad Boys - " it's fairly proficiently made,in a brutal,realistic, neo-Warners style - the suspense is of a very primitive kind:you know early that things are going to get worse, and you have a fascinated dread of what's coming. But even when episodes are powerful, they're banal."
• The Flight of the Eagle
• Tender Mercies
• Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
• Blue Thunder
• Fanny and Alexander
• WarGames

Editions

• Henry Holt & Co., 1984, hardbound (ISBN 0030693624)
• Marion Boyars, 1986, paperback (ISBN 0714528412)