Rob Garver, director of the forever-gestating What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, needs $75K to finish the film, which I had expected (emphasis on the “had”) would be hitting the fall festivals. I guess not. Okay, I’ll contribute $100 but it profoundly bothers me when a trailer has a slightly wider than correct aspect ratio. I’m not talking about the Kickstarter pitch as much as the Vimeo trailer posted after the jump. I hate the horizontal taffy-pull look. Fix it, please.

“If we go back and think over the movies we’ve enjoyed—even the ones we knew were terrible movies while we enjoyed them—what we enjoyed in them, the little part that was good, had, in some rudimentary way, some freshness, some hint of style, some trace of beauty, some audacity, some craziness….They have the joy of playfulness. In a mediocre or rotten movie, the good things may give the impression that they come out of nowhere; the better the movie, the more they seem to belong to the world of the movie. Without this kind of playfulness and the pleasure we take from it, art isn’t art at all, it’s something punishing, as it so often is in school where even artists’ little jokes become leaden from explanation.” — from a Pauline Kael piece called “Trash, Art and the Movies,” from “Going Steady.”

trailer for What She Said documentary from Rob Garver on Vimeo.

Previously: “A doc about the most influential film critic of the 20th Century should be dynamic, vividly visual, bothered, manic, flourishy and to some degree reflective of the rhythms and brushstrokes of some of the mid-century filmmakers Kael deeply admired. It should move and seduce and agitate. It should deliver, in short, a facsimile of the colloquial style and obsessive energy of Kael’s writing.”