Rereading Kael’s work in Hooked, her collection of reviews from 1985-1987, I am struck by how much of her writing unfolds like a well-crafted e-mail. Kael’s reactions to movies, whether they enthralled, angered or bored her to tears, are captured with such immediacy and freshness that they transcend normal print barriers, giving contemporary readers the sense of experiencing her opinions in “real-time,” rather than from across a span of 15 years.
Take, for example, her description of Jack Nicholson in 1987’s The Witches of Eastwick, which immediately stirs up memories of the 1980s, pre-Joker incarnation of the actor (before he became a self-parody). Nicholson, Kael writes, "snuffles and snorts like a hog, and he talks in a growl…he has half-closed priggish, insinuating eyes, and his big, shaggy head doesn’t look as if it belonged on those small, fleshy shoulders…He seems to have given more attention to assembling his flowing brocade robes than he ever gave to assembling his body. He’s so repulsive, he’s funny" (Hooked, pp. 323-324).
Kael’s portrayal of Nicholson is vivid and wicked, broadly painted and yet dead-on. It is not unlike the bitchily humorous sketches of today’s crop of female writers - among them, The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Molly Ivins. This generation’s print work has taken on a new and arguably more potent life on the Web, sparking daily praise and outrage across online discussion forums from readers the world over.
Likewise, many of the passages from Hooked fill me with the desire to contact Kael and sound off on the movies she’d reviewed, as well as the reviews themselves. My preferred mode of communication would be the Internet. As a young Gen-Xer, I can barely fathom “snail mail”; plus, the feelings she incited in me are too intense and urgent to wait for any postman.
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