In 1939, Russell Maloney called “The Wizard of Oz” “a stinkeroo.” “I did not care for Agatha Christie,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1944, after sampling the author’s vast œuvre with “Death Comes as the End,” “and I never expect to read another of her books.” Pauline Kael was notoriously spiky; of the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” she wrote, “the movie is ungainly—you can almost see the chalk marks it’s not hitting.” And, while she seemed to adore “Yentl,” she called “Shoah,” which is considered one of the greatest documentaries of all time, “a form of self-punishment.” (She was wrong, but that’s for another day.) Then there was the rock critic Ellen Willis, who had the temerity to trash the Woodstock festival, in 1969, and a few years later lamented, of David Bowie, that there was “nothing provocative, perverse, or revolting” about him, and announced plainly that “his more recent stuff bores me.” Ryan Schreiber, leading quite a pointy Pitchfork, was picking up the mantle put down by Rolling Stone’s Greil Marcus (who began his 1970 review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?”) and Creem’s Lester Bangs (immortalized in the film “Almost Famous” by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who explained that music is “a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America”).
Author: David Remnick
Published at: 2025-09-02 22:30:00
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