Go Ahead, Make My Lecture!

Critic Pauline Kael goes to great lengths panning director Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” in this week’s New Yorker. But Kael carried her vitriol beyond the page to a cinema talk the other day at the University of Pennsylvania.

Discoursing about how she picks films to review, Kael said: “ ‘Bird’ I give a great deal of space to because I think it is excruciatingly bad and it is being celebrated all over the country.”

She expressed particular disgust that the drama about jazz great Charlie (Bird) Parker was honored at a black-tie affair at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art: “It’s being called a ‘consummate masterpiece’ in Time and other magazines. And it’s a stinker! It’s a rat’s nest of a movie and it is all flashback so you never know where you are.”

Kael, with the crowd roaring, claimed that some fellow critics are fawning over “Bird” because “although (Eastwood) is a perfectly atrocious director, they would like to be Clint Eastwood. It is basically as silly as that.”

“I mean, he is tall and his stardom is very sexy and a lot of people on magazines who lead lives that are not very exciting imagine him to have a terrific time.”