Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

With the annual Academy Award presentation coming up this week, my thoughts turn to Pauline Kael. If you think you know movies and you don't recognize the name "Pauline Kael," you don't know as much about movies as you thought you did.

Kael began her career of publicly dissecting movies in 1953, when she published her first review in City Lights, a San Francisco quarterly that once published the journalism of Jack London and Frank Norris. In 1967 she moved to The New Yorker and the position she called "the best job in the world;" her overture there was a review of "Bonnie and Clyde," which she called "the most excitingly American American movie since 'The Manchurian Candidate.' " A model for those who, even in middle age, feel their real stardom is yet to come, Kael was nearly fifty when she shot to national prominence.

Over the years that followed, while countless moviegoers turned weekly to "The Current Cinema," Kael amassed an opus of 14 books which, when collected, form a sort of history of modern American cinema and, Kael insists, her memoirs: "I Lost it at the Movies" (1965), "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" (1968), "Going Steady" (1970), "The Citizen Kane Book" (1971), "Deeper Into Movies" (1973), "Reeling" (1976), "When the Lights Go Down" (1980), "5001 Nights at the Movies" (1982), "Taking It All In" (1984), "State of the Art" (1985), "Hooked" (1989), "5001 Nights at the Movies, Expanded" (1991), "Movie Love" (1991), and "For Keeps" (1994). For the newcomer to Kael, "For Keeps" is the place to start, as it is a sampler of the best reviews from her previous collections.

Despite the fact that New Yorker editors tried to do a makeover on her, to turn her into what she calls "a genteel fuddy-duddy stylist who says, "One assumes that . . .'" and who does not walk out on the absurdity of Harold Pinter or Fellini, Kael retired from reviewing in 1991 (due to illness) with her essential style intact. When it all comes down to it, she is even the best critic of herself. She writes in the Introduction to For Keeps that her "worst flaw" was "reckless excess, in both praise and damnation" and admits that she "often got carried away by words."

Her reviews had a direct, immediate quality, owing, she theorizes, to the fact that she didn't have the contemporary reviewer's luxury of being able to re-view scenes or whole films on videotape -- she had to write exclusively from memory. She was highly serious about movies but never reverent; she is, after all, the woman who called a classic movie starring Julie Andrews "The Sound of Mucous."

Much ink has been devoted to the wide influence of Kael's style. During her pre-New Yorker career, a group of imitators sarcastically known in publishing as "the Paulettes" (regardless of their gender) sprang up. Much later in her career, a reviewer commented that her style has been as widely mimicked among reviewers of all genres as Hemingway's was among novelists.

But no amount of describing Kael's style on the part of anyone but Kael herself can really do it justice (I wish I could do Pauline Kael on par with the imitation actress Emma Thompson once did of Jane Austen at the Golden Globe awards). It's best to let Kael speak for herself, so here are samples:

On the public controversy surrounding "Bonnie and Clyde:" "What good movie doesn't give some offense? the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it -- perhaps a law should be passed against it."

On "M*A*S*H:" "I am happy to say that 'M*A*S*H,' taking full advantage of the new permissive rating system, is blessedly profane. I've rarely heard four-letter words used so exquisitely well in a movie, used with such efficacy and glee. I salute 'M*A*S*H' for its contribution to the art of talking dirty."

On "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:" "It's a facetious Western, and everybody in it talks comical."

On "The Poseidon Adventure:" "'The Poseidon Adventure' is about an ocean liner that turns turtle. . . . The picture would be more fun if we cared about who got killed and who survived; . . . the only loss I regretted for an instant was Roddy McDowall . . . . We could certainly do with less of the antique feminine hysteria that slows down the action, especially since we can see that the girls (Stella Stevens, Carol Lynley, and Pamela Sue Martin) are there for the splendor of their rear ends as the camera follows them climbing ladders toward safety."

On "Fatal Attraction:" "Fatal Attraction" is just about the worst dating movie imaginable -- a movie almost guaranteed to start sour, unresolvable arguments."

On "Born on the Fourth of July:" "It's almost inconceivable that Ron Kovic was as innocent as the movie and the 1976 autobiography on which it's based make him out to be. Was this kid kept in a bubble? At some level, everybody knows about the ugliness of war. Didn't he ever read anything on the civil War -- not even "The Red Badge of Courage"? . . . wouldn't he have heard of "Catch-22" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"? Wouldn't he have looked at "Mad'?"

On "The Little Mermaid:" "Hans Christian Andersen's tear-stained "The Little Mermaid' is peerlessly mythic. It's the closest thing women have to a feminine Faust story. . . . [But] I expected to see something more than a bland reworking of old Disney fairy tales, featuring a teen-age tootsie in a flirty seashell bra."

On "Dances with Wolves:" "[Kevin] Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. . . . The movie -- Costner's debut as a director -- is childishly naive. . . . This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.)"

And just when you're thinking that Kael doesn't really like anything, she surprises you with (for her) some unlikely choices:

On "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial:" "Like "Close Encounters,' "E.T.' is bathed in warmth, and it seems to clear all the bad thoughts out of your head. It reminds you of the goofiest dreams you had as a kid, and rehabilitates them. . . . Genuinely entrancing movies are almost as rare as extraterrestrial visitors."

On "Batman:" "The master flake Tim Burton understands what there is about Batman that captures the moviegoer's imagination. The picture doesn't give us any help on the question of why Bruce Wayne, in creating an alternate identity, picked a pointy-eared, satanic-looking varmint. But Burton uses the fluttering Batman enigmatically, playfully . . . This spectacle . . . has a poetic quality, but it moves pop fast. The masked man in the swirling, windblown cape has become the hero of a comic opera that's mean and anarchic and blissful. It has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. The images sing."

If you find yourself saying now, "I wonder what she thought of . . . ," you're hooked. This is the reaction my students always have when they encounter Kael for the first time: What did she think of "The Exorcist"? How did she like "Star Wars"? "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? What would she think of "American Beauty"? "Fargo"? What would she say about the surprising success of "The Blair Witch Project"? Largely because of her direct, conversational style and the thoroughness with which she dissected movies (she bristled at the term film). Kael developed a large following, composed about equally of people who loved her and people who hated her.

I was one of those who loved her. She was brash; she was stubborn; she was often nearly obscene. But she was right more often than she was wrong. She was never boring. She always taught you something about a picture, even if you had seen it several times and watched it carefully. And she always made clear that "there is so much to love in movies."

We have a winner!

Rex Bowman is the one person who was able to answer all 26 questions of Professor Whited's quiz last week on women in journalism. He's the Richmond Times-Dispatch's man in Roanoke, so if you think that gave him an unfair advantage, e-mail him.

For the record, here are the correct answers:

Katharine Graham is owner and publisher of The Washington Post

Katie Couric is co-anchor of NBC’s Today show

Jill Nelson is fthe irst black woman to write for The Washington Post Sunday magazine

Margaret Fuller is the first female foreign correspondent (also edited The Dial for Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Jean Jadhon is WDBJ-7 News at 5 and 11 anchor

Anna Quindlen is the author of "Hers" column in The New York Times

Leslie Stahl is a 60 Minutes correspondent

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book (first important women’s magazine)

Barbara Walters is co-anchor of ABC-News 20-20 program

Margaret Bourke-White is a photojournalist at Life

Helen Thomas is UPI White House Bureau Chief; known for "Thank you, Mr. President"

Judy Woodruffis CNN co-anchor who moderated a 2000 presidential debate

Nina Totenbergis a National Public Radio correspondent

Elizabeth Timothy is the first American woman to publish a newspaper (Charleston, S.C.)

Pauline Kael was the long-time movie reviewer for The New Yorker

Wendy Zomparelli is The Roanoke Times’s general manager

Jane Pauley is co-anchor of NBC’s Dateline

Lynn Russell is CNN Headline News anchor

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with Susan B. Anthony, editor of Revolution, a suffragist newspaper

Maureen Dowd is winner of the 1999 Pulitzer prize for commentary

Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer wrote the world’s longest-running column, "Dorothy Dix Talks"

Nellie Bly was the "stunt" reporter who disguised herself to get the story

Anne "Q" Hare McCormick: New York Times foreign correspondent and first female Pulitzer-prize winner

Edna Buchanan is Miami Herald crime reporter; author of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face"

Ellen Goodman: Boston Globe nationally syndicated columnist

Katrina Waugh is The Roanoke Times’ only female sportswriter

The woman who spent four decades at the movies