The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  ‘But you can’t see all of the picture!’ I protested. ‘How can that be fine?’

  ‘I’ve checked,’ said Roger, as if this somehow explained his position. Which it didn’t.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve checked? You’ve just agreed with me that the top of the picture is missing. I think it’s a foot, you think it’s a few inches – what the heck, let’s split the difference and call it a “nadge”. Whatever. The point is we both agree that some part of the picture is notable by its absence so just tell the projectionist to rack it down a bit and …’

  ‘He can’t “rack it down a bit” while the film is playing,’ declared Roger with an air of dismissive superiority.

  This sounded like utter bollocks. I decided it was time to move things up a gear, and do something I have honestly never done before: pull D-list celebrity rank.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, quietly enough to make Roger have to lean forward in order to hear what I was saying. ‘I am a film critic. I have been a film critic for twenty-five years. I know the film playing in Screen Seven isn’t meant to look like that because I saw it properly projected at a press screening in London four days ago, where I particularly enjoyed seeing all of Zac Efron’s head, including his hair. I don’t know whether you’re projecting from celluloid or digital but I do know that his hair should feature prominently in either format, which it isn’t doing in Screen Seven. I know that it is possible to correct an image on screen while the film is playing because highly qualified projectionists have been doing just that for over a hundred years. I also know that I have paid a huge amount of money to watch this film, and having done so I expect you to have the courtesy to take my complaints about the quality of the picture seriously enough to actually go and do something about it …’

  Roger looked at me. I looked at Roger.

  Everyone else looked at Roger and Me.

  We stood there, deadlocked.

  Finally, Roger went for his gun.

  ‘The picture’s fine,’ he said.

  And with that, he turned on his heel and strode off into the foyer.

  On the journey home, I asked my daughter if she’d enjoyed the film.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she said. ‘It was great. I really like Zac Efron.’

  ‘Did you like his hair?’ I asked, in a leading kind of way.

  ‘Umm, sure. But I meant more that I really like him as an actor. He’s got a really good “dramatic range”. You know, he can do happy, and sad; romantic, and tough; grown-up, but childlike. He’s really good.’

  ‘But what about his hair?’ I insisted. ‘Could you see it alright?’

  ‘What do you mean? His hair was fine. Why? Didn’t you like it?’

  ‘Yes. I liked it a lot, but I just couldn’t see it because the picture was racked too high.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The picture was misaligned. It kept cutting off the top of his head. And his hair. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘Oh yeah, but so what? You could see his face OK.’

  ‘Yes, but you couldn’t see his hair.’

  My daughter looked at me as if I was mad.

  ‘But, Dad, he wasn’t acting with his hair, he was acting with his face.’

  She thought for a moment, and then frowned.

  ‘Is that where you went in the middle of the film? Were you having another argument with the cinema manager?’

  ‘What? No. Well, not the manager. The assistant manager. Or maybe the about-to-be-the-assistant manager. Roger somebody or other. And it wasn’t an argument …’

  ‘Daaad,’ said my daughter, rolling her eyes in exasperation. ‘You’re always getting into arguments.’

  ‘I am not.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘No, I’m not!’

  ‘Yes, you are; look, you’re doing it now!’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘You are. Why couldn’t you just sit and watch the film? Like everybody else …?’

  I had no answer to this. Or rather, I had an answer that was so long it would take forever to explain.

  I decided to change the subject.

  ‘OK, so you liked it?’ I said, cheerfully. ‘You had a good time at the cinema? It was fun, right?’

  My daughter nodded.

  ‘What did you like best about it?’

  Georgia paused, looked at me with her best deadpan expression, and then said:

  ‘Popcorn.’

  Chapter Two

  WHY BLOCKBUSTERS SHOULD BE BETTER

  ‘Well, it’s one for the money …’

  Carl Perkins

  HERE ARE THREE absolute truths:

  1. The world is round.

  2. We are all going to die.

  3. No one enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.

  Oh, I know loads of people paid to see POTC3 (as I believe it is known in the industry). And some of them may claim to have enjoyed it. But they didn’t. Not really. They just think they did. As a film critic, an important part of my job is explaining to people why they haven’t actually enjoyed a movie even if they think they have. In the case of POTC3, the explanation is very simple.

  It’s called ‘diminished expectations’. Let me give you an example.

  When I was a student in Manchester I lived in a place called Hulme, a sprawling concrete estate of industrially produced deck-access housing that had been declared unfit for families in the mid-seventies and had subsequently descended into oddly bohemian squalor. By the time I arrived in Hulme in the early eighties it was full of students who loved it, because the rent was incredibly cheap and nobody paid it anyway – the council couldn’t evict you for non-payment because that would just make you homeless and Hulme was the place to which they sent homeless people after they’d been thrown out of everywhere else.

  The architecture of Hulme was a strange mix of sixties sci-fi futurism and bleak Eastern European uniformity, the kind of place J.G. Ballard had nightmares about. It was grimly cinematic, so much so that the photographer Kevin Cummins had used it as the background for his iconic photographs of Joy Division, the most existentially miserable band of the seventies. At nights, as the sun went down and the lights came up around the McEwan’s beer factory which wafted noxious fumes across the entire misbegotten district, it seemed more like a scene from Blade Runner than the landscape of a thriving northern town. At regular intervals gangs of straggle-haired youths, who appeared to have escaped from the set of Mad Max 2, would drift across the overpass that traversed the Mancunian Way, shopping trolleys of worthless loot pushed religiously before them and umpteen dogs on various bits of string prowling behind them picking off survivors. Occasionally, an incongruous ice-cream van would creep its lonely way from one hideously uninviting tower block to another, its broken chimes turned up to maximum volume, creating a hellish racket that was somewhere between a nursery rhyme and a death rattle. As far as anyone could tell, it was selling drugs. We called it ‘The Ice Cream Van of the Apocalypse’.

  Mugging was a fairly common occurrence in Hulme, as was burglary and the occasional assault by packs of wild dogs. When I first moved into Otterburn Close, my third-floor flat had a pathetically inadequate H-frame door that was one part rotten wood to ten parts flimsy ‘security glass’. The first time I got burgled, the door was broken so badly that the council were unable to fix it, so they replaced it with a newfangled ‘security door’. Unlike their predecessors these were largely made of wood, with three tiny window slats allowing the people inside to look out without allowing everyone outside to come in. These new doors were such a whizzo idea that everyone wanted one and the council just couldn’t keep up with demand.

  The next time I got burgled, they stole the door. Such was life in Hulme.

  One day, a man from the council popped in to visit a friend of mine called Phil, who had accidentally agreed to take part in a survey of some sort. All he had to do was answer a few very simple questions about the state of his flat and his experience of living in Hulme.


  ‘How is the flat?’ asked the man with the clipboard. ‘All fine?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ replied Phil, ‘all absolutely fine. Very good in fact.’

  ‘So, no complaints?’

  ‘No, no complaints.’

  ‘None whatsoever?’

  ‘No, really, everything’s fine.’

  ‘I see,’ said the man from the council, apparently unconvinced. ‘So all the services in the flat are in full working order?’

  ‘Well,’ replied Phil, ‘the boiler doesn’t work.’

  ‘Ah, I see. And how long has it been out of order?’

  ‘Well,’ said Phil, ‘that’s hard to say because it wasn’t working when we got here.’

  ‘And how long ago was that?’

  ‘About three years ago.’

  ‘Three years?’

  ‘Yes. About that.’

  ‘So your boiler hasn’t worked for at least three years?’

  ‘No. But, you know, we make do …’

  ‘I see. And is there anything else that doesn’t work?’

  ‘Well, of course the intercom’s never been connected, so technically that “doesn’t work”, although it’s not as if it’s broken – it’s just not there. And the downstairs toilet’s bust. But it’s only the downstairs one, so, hey. And the kitchen sink leaks, so we use a bowl. Which is fine. And come to think of it the asbestos has started to crumble and leave little white flakes all over the inside of the boiler cupboard which is probably rather dangerous. But it’s not a problem because, to be honest, we rarely open the boiler-cupboard door anyway.’

  ‘Because the boiler doesn’t work?’

  ‘No, because of the cockroaches.’

  ‘I see,’ said the man from the council, laying his clipboard on his lap. ‘I’m afraid we’ve come across this rather a lot. It’s called “diminished expectations”.’

  All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the people who think they enjoyed POTC3 are simply suffering from the cinematic equivalent of long-term deprivation from the basics of a civilised existence. They are the multiplex dwellers who have become used to living in the cultural freezing cold, whose brains have been addled by poisonous celluloid asbestos, and whose expectations of mainstream entertainment have been gradually eroded by leaky plumbing and infestations of verminous pests.

  They are the Audiences of the Apocalypse.

  How did they get here?

  The short answer is: Michael Bay.

  The long answer is: Michael Bay; Kevin Costner’s gills; Cleopatra on home video; and the inability of modern blockbusters to lose money in the long run, no matter how terrible they may be.

  If you don’t believe me, ask yourself this question: ‘Was Pearl Harbor a hit?’

  The answer, obviously, ought to be a resounding ‘No’. For, as even the lowliest of amoebic life forms can tell you, that film was shockingly poor in ways it is almost painful to imagine. For one thing, it is ‘un film de Michael Bay’, the reigning deity of all that is loathsome, putrid and soul destroying about modern-day blockbuster entertainment. ‘There are tons of people who hate me,’ admits Bay, who turned an innocuous TV-and-toys franchise into puerile pop pornography with his headache-inducing Transformers movies. ‘They said that I wrecked cinema. But hey, my movies have made a lot of money around the world.’ If you want kids’ movies in which cameras crawl up young women’s skirts while CGI robots hit each other over the head, interspersed with jokes about masturbation and borderline-racist sub-minstrelsy stereotyping, then Bay is your go-to guy. He is also, shockingly, one of the most commercially successful directors working in Hollywood today, a hit-maker who proudly describes his visual style as ‘fucking the frame’ and whose movies appear to have been put together by people who have just snorted two tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium. Don’t get me wrong – he’s not stupid; he publicly admitted that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was below even his own poor par (his exact words were ‘When I look back at it, that was crap’), after leading man and charisma vacuum Shia LaBeouf declared that he ‘wasn’t impressed with what we did’. But somehow Bay’s awareness of his own films’ awfulness simply makes matters worse. At least Ed Wood, director of Plan 9 from Outer Space, thought the trash he was making was good. Bay seems to know better, and if he does that knowledge merely compounds his guilt. Down in the deepest bowels of the abyss there is a tenth circle of Hell in which Bay’s movies play for all eternity, waiting for their creator to arrive, his soul tortured by the realisation that he knew what he was doing …

  But I digress. Back to Pearl Harbor. In early 2001, Pearl Harbor was the most eagerly awaited blockbuster of the summer season. The script was by Randall Wallace, whose previous piece of historical balderdash was the Oscar-winning Braveheart, a movie that allegedly advanced the cause of Scottish nationalism with its shots of lochs, thistles, and men in kilts and blue woad eating haggis to the sound of bagpipes (although most of it was actually shot in Ireland after someone cut a canny deal with the government to use the An Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil as extras – Viva William Wallace!). As a writer who appears to have a flimsy grasp of history, and who would have us believe that it is possible for men to deliver defiant speeches whilst having their intestines removed on a rack, Wallace was the perfect choice to pen a movie about the worst military disaster in US history in which ‘America wins!’ The fact that Pearl Harbor (the movie) would attempt this revisionist coup de grâce in the same year that America suffered its worst attack on home soil since Pearl Harbor (the real disaster, rather than the movie) could not have been predicted by the film-makers. But the fact that they were making one of the worst pieces of crap to grace movie theatres in living memory should have been horribly apparent to anyone who had read that bloody awful screenplay. Bad writing is one thing – bad reading is unforgivable. Wallace may be a rotten screenwriter (he writes lines that even Ben Affleck looks embarrassed to deliver), but it was Michael Bay and Pirates of the Caribbean producer Jerry Bruckheimer who gave him the go-ahead, and who must therefore shoulder the blame.

  Anyway, the film got made and released, with the full support of the US Navy who gave the film-makers access to their military hardware and staged a premiere party by a graveyard (the eponymous harbour) to the shock and awe of relatives of the dead. Hey ho. The reviews were terrible, although I was personally guilty of the most atrociously contrary humbug by attempting to claim that the movie really wasn’t as utterly awful as everyone was saying. What the hell was I thinking? Looking back on it now, I shudder to remember just how lenient I had been – how I had claimed that the film offered a brainless spectacle in the now time-honoured tradition of summer blockbusters, about which I had recently written a stupidly enthusiastic article for some glossy publication from whom I was frankly flattered to receive a commission. It was a shameful misjudgement, which I will carry with me to my grave, and I fully expect to be joining Mr Bay in that multiplex in Hell, wracked by the guilty knowledge that I just stood by and allowed this horror to happen.

  Never trust a critic.

  Especially this critic.

  Others, however, were more forthright and correctly identified Pearl Harbor for the cack that it so clearly was. Audiences were in agreement – the vast majority of the emailed comments that Simon Mayo and I received at our BBC 5 Live radio show from people who had shelled out good money to watch Pearl Harbor (I saw it at a free press preview screening – always a plus) were roundly condemnatory, and many were genuinely flabbergasted by just how boring the movie had been.

  So, the film was a flop, right?

  Wrong.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Listen …

  During production, there was much trade-press tooth-sucking about the fact that Pearl Harbor’s ‘authorised starting budget’ was $135 million, a record-breaking sum back then. Bay and Bruckheimer had originally wanted $208 million, and the director was widely reported to have ‘walked’ on several occasions as arguments about how much money the
movie should cost continued. As the story of the budget grew, Bay and Bruckheimer very publicly agreed to take $4 million salary cuts (in return for a percentage of the profits – clever) to ‘keep the budget down’, thereby giving the impression that every cent spent would be up there on screen. The final cost of the film was somewhere between $140 and $160 million, figures gleefully quoted by negative reviewers who spied a massive flop ahoy and predicted chastening financial losses. Yet in Variety’s annual roundup of the biggest grossing movies of 2001, Pearl Harbor came in at number six, having taken just shy of $200 million dollars in the US alone. By the time the film had finished its worldwide theatrical run, this abomination had raked in a staggering $450 million worldwide, helping to push Buena Vista International’s takings over the $1 billion mark for the seventh consecutive year. No matter that almost everyone who saw the film found it a crushing disappointment – as far as the dollars were concerned, Pearl Harbor was an unconditional hit.

  It gets worse. Having more than made its money back in cinemas, Pearl Harbor went on to become an equally outrageous success on DVD, the release of the money-spinning disc tastefully timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the original attack. Available in ‘several packages, including a gift set’ (and at 183 minutes, Pearl Harbor is the gift that just keeps on giving), the DVD included a commentary track by Michael Bay who was apparently aware that his bold attempts to make a 1940s-style romance had been misinterpreted by some viewers as simply rubbish. Presumably it wasn’t the film that was at fault – it was the film’s critics who just weren’t up to it.