No time to describe this now, just know it’s about Pauline Kael and her influence on contemporary—and contemporary New Yorker—film criticism, and also that the writer uses “kaelled” as a verb in his headline. (Which seems to be a gaming term when spelled with one L; if you know more, write in.) As for me, I own almost every single Kael volume in first edition, and I don’t collect first editions! And one of ’em’s signed! Don’t burgle me!
Speaking of film critics, Juno, Knocked Up, and suchlike, here’s a sound critique of complaints by Time‘s Richard Corliss, who thinks critics are showing off with their lists of arty obscurities and ignoring “mainstream” movies. What can American movie audiences handle? Why don’t we try making and hyper-promoting fewer terrible movies and find out?

Sometimes it takes a national event to bring a taboo conversation to the fore. Terry Schiavo’s sad story and the attendant shamelessness of political opportunists, for instance, did have a positive effect: a lot of people finally got a grip and made living wills. Judd Apatow’s movie Knocked Up sparked a lot of debate in the press and at parties about how to deal with unplanned pregnancy between two people who weren’t planning to be together for the long haul, and I bet in a lot of bedrooms and dorm rooms, too. (You may recall that we had an extensive debate about the movie when David Denby wrote an essay about love and lovable-ish losers in the movies for The New Yorker.) More than a spoonful of sugar helped the medicine go down in Knocked Up; the movie is compassionate and funny, and in many respects, startlingly real.

In Slate this week, Meghan O’Rourke considers Katherine Heigl’s mild yet apparently heretical recent remark to Vanity Fair that Knocked Up is “a little sexist.” O’Rourke expands the commentary into a thoughtful essay about cultural expectations of maturity, responsibility, and gender behavior, observing astutely, “A culture that assigns all that weight to what ‘men’ and ‘women’ want only makes it more difficult for couples to establish their own fruitful ratio of intimacy to privacy.”

That Heigl felt it necessary to recant to People at all (thanks to O’Rourke for that link) makes me glum, given that what she said to Vanity Fair was awfully tame. On the other hand, as some of the film-land folks who were at my friend Meg’s wedding this past weekend related, Apatow is so (unsurprisingly) golden in Hollywood these days he’s practically untouchable. There’s a phrase screenwriters use now when they want to make a screenplay or pilot warmer, hipper, more sellable: “Just Judd it up!” And let me say once again that I love this guy. Do you know what I’m doing even as I type? I’m listening to the director’s commentary for Disc 2 of Undeclared, Apatow’s ill-fated, little-known, and totally charming TV series. That’s how much I love this guy.

Also, Knocked Up is a little sexist, a truth Apatow pretty much acknowledged, in a self-aware and relaxed manner, in his recent New Yorker Festival interview with Denby and Seth Rogen. If you haven’t seen the video of the conversation, one of the high points of the festival and a humongous crowd-pleaser, watch it now. So Apatow can admit—as he does at the end of the interview—that he has a lot to learn about women and women characters; Heigl is supposed to pose and smile, and not say anything at all. Now, that seems a little sexist to me.

Meanwhile, Details laments the rise of the twenty- and thirty-something “tweenager” woman, who text-messages her friends “OMG!” and watches Gossip Girl. For some reason this seems to be more frightening to Details than, say, the rest of the TV-watching population, men included, watching Gossip Girl. Maybe it’s because of “the inconvenient truth that men are not as attracted to women over 30,” as a letter-writer in the same issue opines (if women are going to act like girls, they should be as lust-worthy as girls, right?), but there’s a point in there somewhere. Too bad there’s also a pair of twentysomething women wearing knee socks and rollerskates and sucking lollipops in the same issue. Don’t simper like a girl, don’t age like a person, don’t bitch and moan like a grown women—gosh, ya can’t win! (I love the use of “inconvenient truth” there, too. PowerPoint that sucker and you might convince me.)

Till the world is just, you might want to consider donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds, for the people who are, in fact, knocked up and need to make that choice. Apparently, in return for your donation, you’ll get a copy of my friend Katha Pollitt’s great book Learning to Drive, and who’da thunk it, it’s compassionate, funny, and startlingly real, too. (Katha’s written about Knocked Up, too.) But it’s not a competition. Judd Apatow is an honest, sensitive modern man who’s got the grace to say he’s still learning, and I love the guy. Have I mentioned that?

as well you should—I use it every day, and so will you if you obtain it (perhaps as a holiday present?), even if you don’t have a blog about The New Yorker—you should know that the same company that helped create it is now responsible for the digital archives of some other magazines you may want to get to know better:

For the rock ‘n’ rollers on your Christmas list, the hippest gift you can give this year is Rolling Stone Cover To Cover: The First 40 Years (Bondi Digital, $125). All the Rolling Stone magazines from its inception to May 2007 are collected onto fully searchable DVD-ROM disks. You can find every cover story and photo. You can find all the interviews with your favorite rockers from Bob Dylan to John Mayer. You can find the serialized version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire Of The Vanities. The set includes more than 98,000 pages of content, easy to read and printable. Bondi also recently released Playboy Cover To Cover: The 50s ($100) collecting the contents of the first decade of the gentlemen’s magazine, which included the original three-part serialization of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. Bondi’s digital platform was used for the release of The Complete New Yorker in 2005.

Thanks to the Clarion-Ledger for the report. The who Clarion-Ledger? The where Clarion-Ledger? It’s always a bit of a treasure hunt on local-newspaper sites. I’ll tell you: Jackson, Mississippi (the recital of all those s’s in kindergarten really pays off later). The paper has quite an interesting history, in fact; a version of it was founded in 1837, and it’s still “one of only a few newspapers in the nation that continues to circulate statewide,” according to the website. Perhaps there will be a digital edition of its early years someday; I sincerely hope so.