John Simon (1925-2019) RIP. I wasn't a fan of his criticism, which I thought was mean-spirited, snooty & emotionally constipated. But he did redeem himself by appearing on a panel with 3 young girls to debate Frozen. So there is good in us all.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5fUK_aHZs …
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Gore Vidal on John Simon: "There is nothing he cannot find to hate. Yet in his way, Mr. Simon is pure ... an Illyrian gangster ... he simply wants to torture and kill in order to be as good an American as Mr. Charles Manson ..."
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John Simon was very nasty in print. He insulted women -- almost always women -- with regards to their looks. I never understood that. It reeked of male privilege. But as a fact checker at the
@thenation, he was very kind to me, helping me source a story on deadline. -
My wild guess (having never met him) is that Simon forgot (or wilfully ignored) the fact that the actors on stage and screen were real people and not paintings or cartoons. If he was known to say the same things about women at cocktail parties, I will stand corrected.
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His judging of women in terms of their looks said a lot about his criticism. He loved Lindsay Wagner, because she reminded him of the Radcliffe women he lusted after, but savaged Daryl Hannah and Barbara Streisand, two objectively attractive women, because they didn't turn him on
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I found them both entertaining but never caught that dynamic. What were the signs of that envy? Imitation? Her enthusiasms matched her antipathies, pressure-wise, whereas he liked, I once counted, exactly two American movies in the entire 1970s (The Candidate and IIRC Badlands).
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He was "The Dracula of Film Critics"! . . . LONG LIVE ANDREW SARRIS!
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Could not disagree more. By about 1975, Kael lost any critical value. This was accented in her phony book about Orson Welles, which was exposed by both Bogdanovich and Carringer. She later took a well deserved triple beating by Adler, Sarris and Gilman.
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But let me add, although Simon made his name as a film critic, he was really a theater critic. That was his home. As far as I was concerned, he was one of the best theater critics of that age. He was a better and more valuable theater critic than Kael was a film critic.
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