The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  Today, that Westworld trailer has become more prescient than ever. In fact it seems to me that ‘Westworld’ is a terrific name for a multiplex cinema chain: a name which combines a cineaste’s sense of modern movie history with a refreshing honesty about what to expect from a trip to your local ten-screener. Think about it: in Westworld the customers cough up huge amounts of money in order to escape from the humdrum reality of their everyday lives and to experience excitement, adventure and really wild things, all without the attendant risks to their person of doing any of those things for real. Their safety and enjoyment are guaranteed by the high-tech nature of this futuristic amusement park, in which everything is controlled by machines and computers that are activated from a distance by the management, who are notably unable to come to anyone’s assistance when everything goes pear-shaped and Yul Brynner’s electronic gunslinger starts putting holes in the park’s visitors. Next thing you know the fun’s over, the pain’s kicked in, everyone’s screaming and someone’s missing the top of their head. As a metaphor for the state of the 21st-century multiplex experience, I’d say that’s pretty damned hard to beat.

  Of course, ever since Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis warned us all that the mediator between the hand and the brain must be the heart rather than a machine, the history of movies has been littered with rebellious or revolting circuitry that serves as a warning against exactly this kind of thing. And yet cinema, the one medium that should be especially aware of the problem of taking humans out of the equation, has been guilty of the most egregious abnegation of accountability when it comes to surrendering the controls to autopilot.

  Over the past few years, the radio show that I co-host with Simon Mayo on BBC 5 Live has been receiving a steady stream of correspondence from projectionists thanking us for our very vocal support of their craft, but sadly assuring us that the battle for their future is lost. Time and again these texts, emails and letters have ended with the projectionist bidding a fond farewell to their vocation and envisaging a future in which everything is controlled from a central computer, over which even individual cinema managers will have no control.

  It is this idea – that you can take the human touch out of cinema and no one will notice – which grieves me the most, and it is a central subject of this book. The questions I raise are fairly simple: Why do we pay to watch movies that we know are really terrible? How can 3-D be the future when it’s failed so many times in the past? Who wants to watch a movie in a cinema that doesn’t have a projectionist but does have a fast-food stand? For me, the sad fate of projectionists is symptomatic of a greater malaise within modern movies, an indication that something of value has been casually cast aside in the rush to maximise profit at the expense of the audience. Yes, movies have always been there to make money, but today, as we shall see, films are financed on the basis of computer-generated spreadsheets, distributed according to first-weekend box-office figures, and projected by robots. The element of danger once so integral to the cinematic experience – necessitating the constant vigilance of living, breathing people – has been replaced by an automated drone of electronic information that requires no supervision, since it is never going to set anything alight. Somehow, while we were all looking the other way, the thing which made us fall in love with movies in the first place got lost: the strange alchemical miracle of celluloid passing through a projector that was the heart of cinema itself. We turned our living rooms into cinemas and our cinemas into living rooms, and now there’s no one left to ask, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’

  Do you believe in the Westworld?

  Chapter One

  LET’S GO TO THE PICTURES

  ‘The cinema will be a pit …’

  Wreckless Eric

  IT WAS A wet Saturday afternoon in October 2010. The sky was the colour of Morrissey’s greasy tea, the climate was somewhere between mizzling and hissing down, and the economic forecast for the foreseeable future was as grim as the last two reels of the French existential torture-porn horror show Martyrs. Even the dogs didn’t seem overly enthusiastic about the prospect of venturing outside, preferring instead to curl up in front of the television and methodically chew their way through my once collectable stash of VHS video nasties. (My partner Linda had sensibly removed the skull-splitting cover of The Driller Killer which I got the director to sign for her – ‘To Linda, from the Driller Killer!’ – so the dogs had started work on a copy of Evilspeak which frankly we weren’t going to miss.) In the kitchen, I was struggling to get my fantastically stroppy Acer laptop to speak to my local multiplex’s automated ticket booking service in order to purchase a couple of tickets for a forthcoming performance, by comparison with which it would have been fairly easy for an entire herd of camels to gallop merrily through the eye of a needle without ever dislodging Omar Sharif. The problem was partly due to the service itself, which was insistent not only upon charging me an exorbitant price to view a film which I had already seen (and knew full well that few others would be interested in seeing) but also upon stinging me for an additional ‘booking fee’ for the privilege of paying through the nose online. Matters were not helped by the fact that my laptop had clearly decided that it did not want me to see said film again (perhaps it thought my time could be better spent uploading Windows 7, which it kept on bloody telling me was ‘waiting to install’ despite the fact that I kept telling it to leave me with the version I’d got and which I understand … sort of) and was doing everything it could to come between me and the cinema in a ‘limited connectivity’ sort of way.

  A few weeks later, I would finally lose all patience with this piece of hi-tech machinery and conclude that it was actually possessed by the Assyrian demon of the south-west wind whose name I had once typed into a document thereby allowing it entry to the accursed wiring. In an attempt to cleanse its foul electronic soul, I took it out into the yard, laid it down on the cold, hard ground, and then worked through our theological differences with the help of a large wooden stake that I drove through its inexorably blackened heart. The computer screamed and shattered and quaked like a soul in torment, levitating and spider-walking as the evil spirits fled from its head-spinning ruptured hard drive. And I was left with a profound feeling of calm and wellbeing, free at last from its hideous Hadean taunts …

  But all that was in the future. For the moment I was left wrestling with the pure evil of the computer (which right now lies crucified upon my office floor) and the faceless malice of the multiplex’s ‘Computer Says No’ automated ticket service, wondering whether this was the start of the kind of story which generally ends really badly in countries where firearms are legal …

  Thank God for gun laws, I say.

  Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity of swearing, booking, more swearing, rebooting, rebooking, yet more swearing, stamping, and finally re-rebooking (for the third time), I appeared to have purchased two tickets for the same price as a small house in Liverpool, and announced triumphantly to my daughter, Georgia, ‘We’re going to see the new Zac Efron movie!’ This was a good thing, because both my daughter and I absolutely love Zac Efron. He’s young, he’s talented, he can sing, dance and act, and when I met him once (briefly) he was sweet, gracious, charming and generally lovely to be around. Even if it was only for a few minutes. Honestly, if all movie stars were as gracious and talented as Zac Efron, I’d have nothing to piss and moan about for the rest of my career. You can smirk all you want, but to my mind Efron is a reminder of the kind of fully rounded star appeal which was required of screen actors before Marlon Brando somehow managed to bamboozle everyone into believing that true talent meant mumbling and snorting like you’ve got a mouthful of cake, turning up late to work because you’ve been ‘researching’ your role in the cafeteria, and refusing to accept Oscars because you don’t like Cowboys and Indians movies. For the record, Marlon Brando was a fool whose growing contempt for his audience caused them to stay away from his later pictures in droves. Which was probably a good
thing, because the fewer people who saw his godawful later movies the better. The decline began when Hollywood studios started paying him staggering amounts of money to be really rubbish for a really short amount of time in films like The Formula and Superman – in both of which he makes what can only be reasonably described as top-billed ‘cameo’ appearances. Things hit rock bottom, however, with his ill-fated nineties remake of The Island of Doctor Moreau, which remains arguably the stupidest film of that decade. That film was the brainchild of South African-born director Richard Stanley, who had made a splash with his low-tech future-shocker Hardware and who had somehow persuaded Marlon to stop eating pies long enough to play the eponymous Dr Moreau in his long-gestated dream project. Apparently Marlon liked Richard, but when co-star Val ‘Boring’ Kilmer got him fired for being weird, Brando carried on picking up the pay cheques and enjoying the catering whilst wearing an ice bucket on his head. (Don’t take my word for it; watch the film. No, on second thoughts, just take my word for it.) Too lazy to learn his lines, Brando insisted on wearing (along with the ice bucket) an earpiece through which a script assistant could prompt his slurred speech, a trick he’d learned on The Formula. Unfortunately, according to co-star David Thewlis, Brando’s earpiece also picked up police radio transmissions, which caused Dr Moreau to observe thoughtfully that a robbery was taking place at Woolworths in the middle of a meaningful soliloquy.

  Rather than being the greatest actor of his generation, Brando was actually Ron Burgundy.

  None of that nonsense would have stuck back in the thirties, when stars were under contracts which demanded that they behaved their raggedy-arsed selves, and slackers swiftly found out what life looked like on the wrong end of a waiter’s pad. Journalists drone on endlessly about how terrific it is that actors now get to control the products in which they star, but anyone who has actually sat through a movie in which actors get producer credits knows that modern thespians know much more about what they need than what audiences actually want. Frankly, if I want to watch someone jerking off in public then there are plenty of public toilets in the Soho area of London where I can get that pleasure for free. But when I pay a large amount of money to see a movie in a theatre which charges me for having the effrontery to attempt to buy a ticket in the first place, then forgive me for thinking that the players in that movie should look, frankly my dear, like they actually give a damn …

  Which Zac Efron most definitely does. I was first won over to his charms by his staggeringly athletic turns in the High School Musical franchise, which started life as direct-to-video fodder but wound up punching above its weight in impressively packed cinemas around the world. From here he graduated to a stand-out turn in Me and Orson Welles, in which he played a young wannabe actor who lands himself a bit part in Welles’s now infamously political reading of Julius Caesar in the thirties. The film was shot in large part at the restored Gaiety Theatre on the Douglas promenade in the Isle of Man, one of the last remaining theatres in the world to house a fully working ‘Corsican Trap’ (specially designed for the ghostly play The Corsican Brothers) which lent a suitably woody, mechanical period look to the understage scenes in the movie. In my role as film critic for BBC2’s The Culture Show, I had been despatched to the island to shoot a piece about the film’s Douglas premiere, to which I took my mum. We stayed at the Sefton Hotel, of which my grandfather, James Stanley Kermode, used to be the Chairman of the Directors – a great thrill for both mum and me, and one that rekindled my unfulfilled desire to move ‘back’ to the island (on which I had never lived in the first place) as soon as humanly possible. Mum had never heard of Zac Efron, and was genuinely bemused when a crowd of screaming teenagers almost prevented him from making his way from the pavement to the front doors of the Gaiety, his presence sparking ear-bashing displays of the kind of pant-wetting hysteria not seen since Donny Osmond topped the charts. Honestly, if the kids could have torn the shirt from his back they would happily have done so. I was nearly knocked down by an incandescent youth who barrelled past me, a look of ecstatic rapture in her eyes, screaming ‘I touched his bum! I touched his bum! He squeezed past me and I got a feel of his bum!!!’

  Mum, meanwhile, stood quietly to one side, smiling at the carnage and occasionally asking ‘Who is he again?’ A few moments later, I got to ‘interview’ Mr Efron – by which I mean that I held a microphone in front of his face for a couple of minutes and attempted to look like it was no big deal, whilst all the time resisting the overwhelming and terrifying temptation to reach out and goose him while I had the chance. After all, it seemed to have done wonders for that teenager, like taking the healing waters at Lourdes or being graced by a hands-on blessing from the Pope. Surely it could do the same for my weary aching bones? I hadn’t been so excited since I unconsciously prodded Liza Minnelli to see if she was real (see previous book) and there was every chance that I was going to disgrace myself again. If Zac clocked this, then he did his consummately professional best to ignore it, answering my questions with self-deprecating wit and charm and generally being every bit as fabulous as (if a little bit smaller than) I hoped he would be. He even signed an autograph for my daughter, which earned me about a billion brownie points and made me briefly the coolest person in the world.

  Briefly.

  All of which brings us back to the local multiplex and my pathetic attempts to curry ongoing favour with my 11-year-old by taking her to see the new Zac Efron movie on the pretence of it being a treat for her when, in reality, it was every bit as much of a treat for me. The movie in question was The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, which I had actually seen at a national press show in London’s Leicester Square only a few days previously. At that screening there had been the usual snorting derision from some of the wizened old farts who constitute the old guard of the British film press (I speak as a wizened old fart myself), many of whom appear to have been clinically inoculated against the charms of any movie which will appeal to teenage girls. Look at the near universal critical derision which has greeted the Twilight movies, a series of films that resonate richly and profoundly with their target audience but that are regularly dismissed as infantile trash by men old enough to be the heroine’s great-grandfather. One of the proudest moments of my life was being mentioned on a Twilight fan website as ‘a rare example of a grey-haired weird bloke who actually gets our movie’, a compliment which is about as barbed as it is possible to get. I’d tell you the name of the website, but it was shown to me by a computer-literate teenager who found it on their iPhone and (Luddite that I am) I now can’t bloody find it myself. In fact, I can’t get on to the internet without asking a 12-year-old to do it for me. You know all those ‘parental locks’ that are installed on internet browsers in order to give grown-ups a false sense of security about what their kids are accessing online? They are actually designed by teenagers so that they can lock their parents out, thereby allowing them to go about their daily high-speed business unencumbered by the slow-lane traffic of old people trying to buy cinema tickets online.

  Anyway, after much internet irritation and the making of a solemn vow never to meddle with computer technology again, I got my daughter into our clapped-out old car, stuck Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool on the CD player (she’s no fan but, dammit, it’s time she learned) and headed off in the direction of the multiplex – one of several within striking distance from home. The journey was typically stressful and elongated, involving several diversions through various villages and town centres, and even out to a trading park and back. Eventually, we arrived at the cinema where (surprise, surprise) the automated ticket machine denied any knowledge either of my existence or (more importantly) of my pre-allocated ticket purchase. This eventuality meant that we had to queue to buy our tickets from a real-life person – or at least from a person who appeared to be breathing and partially conscious, which is as near as they got to ‘real-life’. I can’t blame them – clearly they had been stunned into a semi-comatose state by the decision of the management to
fold the selling of tickets and/or fast food into one staggeringly inefficient (but clearly very cheap) vending process. The line to buy tickets, therefore, snaked out into the foyer, with each transaction lasting about five minutes as every ticket purchase was supplemented by an endless discussion about sweet or salty popcorn, small, medium or large-sized Cokes, and ‘Do you want special sauce with your nachos?’ ephemera. Never mind the fact that some of us find the entire practice of eating in cinemas an abominable curse which should be outlawed forthwith – if you wanted to get into the cinema at all you had to go through the fast-food stand first, and the chances were you were going to leave with a barrel-load of noisy, sickening crap whether you wanted it or not.

  Finally, a good five minutes after the movie was due to start (I hate arriving late, but I assumed there’d be half an hour of terrible trailers, annoying adverts and staggeringly irritating ‘thank you for not pirating this movie’ notices – which always make me want to go home and download it on principle) we got to the front of the line and began the exciting process of buying a ticket all over again.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to the floppy-haired child behind the counter who was even less pleased to see me than I was to see him.

  ‘I’ve booked two tickets online, for the two forty p.m. performance of Charlie St. Cloud, seats F8 and 9, but the machine doesn’t recognise my card, so apparently I now need to pick them up here. From you. Manually. I have a copy of my computer print-out receipt if that helps.’

  ‘Waaah?’ said the child, with the tone of one who had just taken a massive hit on Ralph Brown’s Camberwell Carrot and was now wondering whether to let go of, or hang on to, the balloon.