Well, there are different types of 'pleasure', from "what is going to happen?" excitement by the narrative, to "whoa!" spectacle, to engagement with an upsettingly non-pleasurable but fascinating story (as in say David Lynch, or something like Dancer In The Dark) and entertainment by the acting, directing, editing, aesthetic, etc style on display as much as by a plot.
My big example of that at the moment would be Cloud Atlas, where I never really felt much of an engagement with any of the individual storylines for many of the characters but the film was highly entertaining and fascinating due to the intricate editing patterns on display.
This is the beauty of re-watching films though, since you can have that, entirely legitimate, visceral/emotional response to a first viewing of a film, but later viewings can be just as interesting as, with a grasp on where the film is taking you, you are in some ways freed up to notice how the various component parts (the editing, the costumes, a particularly good performance or section of the film, and so on) are working to achieve the whole. That is one of the most fascinating aspects of film, and is something I have found can even save films that I do not particularly like as a whole, as there is often an interesting moment, performance, costume, camerawork, even previously unseen real-life location or interestingly designed set, etc, etc to make that experience worthwhile.
Mr Sausage wrote:
Yet only watching a movie once is exactly the above: a first glance, the moment when you take in the whole. After you have the whole in mind, then you should go back and study the various parts. There's no reason to demand that you know exactly what you're looking at on first glance. (I owe Nabokov for this comparison/argument).
Some movies just plain aren't understandable until you've come to a solid grasp of how all the pieces are working, and that takes a number of viewings just in order to catch everything. I don't see any reason to demand that movies should be otherwise. If it's complex enough it's going to have to be wrestled with, and you can't do that on one viewing alone.
I do have some sympathy with Kael on the point she was making, in the sense that a first reaction is a legitimate one. There is also the issue of needing to keep up with a regular critic's schedule of viewing all of the latest releases, which I guess must tempt critics into making quick thumbs up or thumbs down judgments to simply get through the number of releases they have to review (this ties into another section of that talk where Kael talks of having a harsher judgement of films which have the same stars or storylines in them, leading up to a dig at Bunuel, where she trashes Exterminating Angel because of it not taxing Bunuel, and just seeming to go over old ground. Kael is rather scathing about a calcified Bunuel-style at that point, but on the other hand that does not acknowledge that recognising themes and tropes of a director can be a source of pleasure rather than of despair at when they will do something new!) Talking of thumbs up or thumbs down, there is also that media pressure on even the most successful critics to move away from longer considered pieces into making quick and snappy yay or nay judgements for an audience about to go to the movies that evening to quickly check - an approach which inevitably makes its mark on critics, and likely encourages new entrants into the critical sphere to see that as their main job goal, rather than understanding and/or appreciating a film, or trying to describe where it may appear to fit into the culture. We can see that going on in the "film critics get the axe" thread, as critical judgements (whether glowingly positive or scathingly negative) based more on an individual critic's personality are replaced with bland, interchangeable almost corporate sponsored reviewers re-presenting the same few studio-approved facts about the film's plot and actors and so on.
My bigger problem with the Kael quote is that she is standing as a figurehead for a problematic system, which has gotten worse in some ways, as the rather over-inflated critic with a presumption that they are going to make or break a film purely based on their review is giving way to reviews in the printed media that often present details about a production with no sense of personality at all, to the extent that you could get exactly the same details from looking at imdb stats!
Both of those systems are commercially focused on the 'here and now' - what's out this weekend/this week/this month/a few months from now after our film festival screenings at the cinema/on home video. There isn't really a commercial impetus to go back and re-tackle already digested works - why go back and re-watch Iron Man 2 when Iron Man 4 will be out in a few months? - unless for certain big screen reissues or on special 'retro' sections.
Yet both of these aspects are where film criticism really comes into its own: distinctive personalities giving their own, maybe crazily idiosyncratic, take on the same pieces of work, and with the ability to focus on different eras, or genres (or whatever they find interesting) of film. Reviewing and re-appraisal of work can be absolutely crucial to that approach.
Then we have the (post-the Kael interview, though TV was around) home video era where filmmakers now know that any film that they make is going to get re-seen numerous times in more intimate surroundings, and can be 'owned' by audiences to view and re-view, ignore or keep their attention fully on, watch in full or just in part, repeat a section over and over, cut up and manipulate into (copyright infringing

) YouTube tributes or strange avant-garde art objects to show what that original film made
them think about. Inspired by the filmmaker's set series of fixed images but able to manipulate into new and unintended forms. That's a whole new relationship with imagery than Kael had in the screening room having the latest film products projected onto her, and with her only reaction to them allowed to be through a positive or negative printed reaction.
That new relationship is perhaps less respectful (though I am sure that we will always need filmmakers to create a vision which can then be critiqued and manipulated, almost as if they are creating the raw material that can be further shaped after they have put their preliminary interpretation on it), but more complex and exciting in some ways. A relationship that might not just be one-way, and which might ask as much from audiences as it does from filmmakers in some ways, from which hopefully the whole culture of film can be enriched. And of which the least taxing, and most entertaining, element would be re-viewing a film over time to see how a reaction to it has changed or evolved.