Books, Arts & Manners: Getting a Fix on the Environment

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang By Pauline Kael Atlantic-Little, Brown, $7.95

Reading Pauline Kael on the movies is like watching a good housekeeper scrubbing up the place. Bales of trash are carted away, dusty reputations are flailed like carpets, odious little smells are tracked to their hiding places in this or that dark corner of the mass culture, unwanted foreign objects (like Michelangelo Antonioni) are turned unceremoniously out of doors, and oh, the joy when she goes tunneling beneath the tasteful art-house furnishings for those linty associations and cobwebby certitudes that make up the mind of the educated liberal audience. When she’s through, the smell of disinfectant can be intoxicating.

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Arlene Croce

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Kiss Kiss Bang Bang By Pauline Kael Atlantic-Little, Brown, $7.95

Reading Pauline Kael on the movies is like watching a good housekeeper scrubbing up the place. Bales of trash are carted away, dusty reputations are flailed like carpets, odious little smells are tracked to their hiding places in this or that dark corner of the mass culture, unwanted foreign objects (like Michelangelo Antonioni) are turned unceremoniously out of doors, and oh, the joy when she goes tunneling beneath the tasteful art-house furnishings for those linty associations and cobwebby certitudes that make up the mind of the educated liberal audience. When she’s through, the smell of disinfectant can be intoxicating.