The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  Nick, who had arrived looking exactly the same as he always did, was horrified.

  ‘Why are you dressed as a girl?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not dressed as a girl,’ I replied, somewhat taken aback. ‘I’m dressed as a grown-up.’

  ‘Well, why are you wearing a girl’s scarf round your neck?’

  ‘It’s not a girl’s scarf,’ I protested. ‘It’s a “cravat”.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A cravat. It’s what grown-ups wear. Grown-up men.’

  Nick looked unconvinced.

  ‘It’s purple,’ he said, after examining it further. ‘Girls wear purple.’

  ‘It’s not purple,’ I retorted somewhat defensively. ‘It’s “paisley”. Paisley is completely different to purple. Just like cravats are completely different to scarves. This is not a purple, girl’s scarf. It is a paisley, man’s cravat.’

  Nick thought about this for a moment whilst making a pained, wincing expression. Perhaps he was trying to imagine a proper grown-up man wearing such a garment and having the testosterone-fuelled panache to pull it off. Would Sean Connery have got away with it? Quite possibly. Plastered all over the Tube station at that very moment were posters of Connery wearing nothing more than thigh-high boots and a red-leather posing pouch advertising his new X-rated sci-fi movie Zardoz. He even had a ponytail and he still didn’t look like a girl. We really wanted to see Zardoz, but since we were currently struggling to look 14, the chances of being able to pass for 18 seemed infinitesimal. Perhaps we could try the posing pouches. Or perhaps not.

  ‘They won’t let you in,’ said Nick firmly. ‘You look like a girl and they won’t let you in.’

  ‘But if I take it off, then I just look like me, and I’m not fourteen and they’ll know,’ I whined.

  ‘How will they know?’ Nick demanded. ‘If they ask you how old you are, you just say that you’re fourteen. It’s simple.’

  But herein lay the rub. For, being an anxious and essentially law-abiding soul, I had actually gone and asked my parents for their permission to attempt to bunk into a movie that I was technically too young to see. And my dad, in what I now consider to be a brilliantly political answer, had told me that he appreciated my being honest enough to ask and therefore didn’t mind me going, as long as I didn’t lie about my age. If the person at the ticket office asked me how old I was, then I had to tell them the truth – that I was 11. If no one asked, then the responsibility was theirs and not mine, in both a moral and legal sense.

  Genius.

  The problem with this strategy was that it required me looking old enough for the person in the ticket booth not to feel the need to ask my age in the first place, since I was so evidently a cosmopolitan teenager who did this sort of thing all the time. Hence the cravat. Obviously. Without this embellishment I was just a dorky kid. And not a very tall dorky kid at that. Things were different for Nick. He was impressively tall for his age. Plus he had loads of dark curly hair, which made him look a bit like Kevin Keegan during his ill-advised perm period and which also added a further couple of inches to his height. As for me, the reason I was wearing training shoes rather than more grown-up leather shoes was because I’d stuffed some newspaper under my heels to give me a smidgen of extra height, and you could only do that with shoes soft enough not to crush the tops of your feet when you tied them up. By which I mean training shoes. The unfortunate side effect of this heel-stacking, however, was that it made me walk a bit funny, like someone tottering upon newly purchased stilettos to which they were not yet comfortably accustomed.

  Like I said – Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.

  Anyway, against his better judgement Nick decided not to argue the point any further, and so we both headed out of Hendon Central station and up the magnificent concrete esplanade that led into the Classic Cinema. Nick strode purposefully, like a man on a mission to see a movie. I hobbled along behind him, like an underage transvestite with ongoing ligament issues. We made it up the steps. Just. And then into the foyer, where Nick boldly headed straight for the ticket office whilst I cowered behind him, hoping that no one would notice me.

  ‘Two for Screen One,’ growled Nick, in an unusually low and guttural voice that he clearly believed made him sound terribly grown-up, but actually made him sound mad and a little bit dangerous. So now we were an underage tranny and a serial killer. Great. I fiddled nervously with my cravat, suddenly wishing that I’d taken Nick’s advice and thrown the damned thing in the bin. I had a pain growing in my calf muscles from walking on the newspaper and I was starting to sweat like someone in the throes of a coronary attack. My neck was itching, my scalp was prickling and I was having difficulty breathing. I started pulling at the cravat as if it was somehow strangling me and in the process made it tighter, so it did indeed start to strangle me. My head began to turn purple, matching the purple-hued paisley of what now looked, more than ever, like a big girl’s scarf. My knees began to wobble, the room began to swim, and for a moment I thought I’d have to be ambulanced off like those punters who had been regularly stretchered out of screenings of The Exorcist in this very cinema.

  It was all over.

  The game was up.

  The gaff was blown.

  The ruse was rumbled.

  We were both clearly going down …

  ‘You want chocolate raisins?’

  What?

  ‘Or chocolate peanuts? I like raisins.’

  Nick was walking nonchalantly toward the sweet counter, which back then was a rather more low-key affair than the extravagant popcorn and nachos fast-food outlets that dominate the foyers of modern multiplexes (see Chapter One). Back then you got to choose between a small cardboard box of stale raisins coated in chocolate or a small cardboard box of similarly prepared nuts. If you were in a really flashy cinema, you also had the option of gorging yourself on a ‘Frankie’s Hot Dog’, a steamingly inedible comestible. Other than that there was nothing – you went to the movies to watch, rather than eat.

  ‘Um, raisins are good,’ I gasped, still unclear as to what exactly had happened at the ticket stand. Presumably we’d been rumbled and were now going to watch The Paper Chase. Again.

  ‘So what happened at the ticket office?’

  Nick looked at me, in my purple girl’s scarf and stack-heeled training shoes, sweating like a water buffalo, unsteady on my legs.

  ‘No problem,’ he said in an off-hand fashion. ‘Raisins then, is it?’

  I struggled to get a grip on the situation.

  ‘What, you mean we got in?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’

  ‘In to Screen One?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘In to Screen One which is showing Blazing Saddles?’

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘And they didn’t ask your age?’

  ‘Nope.’ Nick paused for a moment before adding, ‘Nor yours. Although the man behind the counter did look rather oddly at you. Well, not “oddly” considering the fact that you’re dressed as a girl.’

  ‘But, crucially, a fourteen-year-old girl?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently so,’ said Nick, before bursting into wild hooting laughter of the kind that would clearly attract the attention of the management if we weren’t careful. Overwhelmed, I grabbed Nick’s arm and bundled him toward Screen One as fast as possible, his shrieking merriment continuing all the way through the door, down the aisle and into the seats, of which we apparently had our pick. There were only ten or 20 other people in the auditorium, and glancing around I noticed that most of them looked no older than Nick and me. Finally wrenching that bloody cravat from around my strangulated neck, I sat back and started to laugh myself, and as far as I can remember I didn’t stop laughing until the end credits of the movie had run and Nick and I were attempting to gather ourselves in the street outside the cinema.

  As far as I was concerned, Blazing Saddles – with its AA-rated farting cowboys and mildly saucy songs – was just about the funniest film I had ever seen
. I honestly couldn’t remember having had more fun in the cinema ever, and that was pretty much what I wrote in my notebook when I got home and settled down to ‘review’ the movie. I sat there for hours struggling to remember all the best lines, the crudest cracks, the naughtiest sight gags, the stupidest bum jokes – all were committed lovingly (and almost certainly inaccurately) to paper so that I could enjoy them over and over again. Even though I had never heard Marlene Dietrich’s Frenchy singing ‘See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have’ in Destry Rides Again, I was tickled pink by the parodic drone of Madeline Kahn performing ‘I’m Tired’ as the ‘Teutonic Titwillow’ Lili Von Shtupp, and took particular pride in my phonetic attempts to capture her cod-German accent (‘I’m doyyyered, doyerred ov be-ink ad-moyyerred …’). Many of the jokes I clearly didn’t understand (Mel Brooks’s ‘Gov’ in voluminous undershorts, retiring behind a curtain with his secretary whilst announcing ‘Gentlemen, affairs of state must take precedence over the affairs of state!’ for example) but I found them funny anyway. The truth, which I gradually came to realise whilst writing that review, was that having actually gotten into the screening in the first place I would have found almost anything hilariously entertaining. Clearly my insane excitement about the convoluted subterfuge that had been used to gain entrance to my first ever AA-certificate film had caused my reactions to become massively overcooked, and when writing about the movie I was writing as much about my own state of mind whilst watching it as about Mel Brooks’s achievement in making it.

  Decades later I remain fiercely aware of this powerful element of film criticism; that what the reviewer brings to the cinema is every bit as important as what’s up there on the screen. Oh, you can dress it up with authoritative-sounding analysis and rigorous contextualisation, both of which are important components of ‘proper’ film criticism (more of which in a moment). But the fact remains that your response to a movie will always be (first and foremost) just that – your response. Over the years those responses will change, and the more movies you see the more sober your reaction to each new film tends to be. This is particularly true of horror movies, or more precisely scary movies. The first time you see someone closing a bathroom cabinet and catching sight of the killer’s reflection in the mirror, chances are you’ll jump out of your skin. But by the time you’ve seen that same gag done a hundred times or more, the effect is rather lessened. That doesn’t mean that it can’t still be scary; rather that it has to be executed with a little more flair, panache and wit to have the desired effect. The same is true of comedy. The first time I watched a bunch of cowboys breaking wind in Blazing Saddles, I laughed so much I thought I was going to soil myself. Nowadays a fart joke has to be really well-timed and splendidly executed to raise a titter, even though farting remains inherently funny.

  The point is that, having now worked as a ‘professional film critic’ for over 25 years, I am certain that my reviews and responses are every bit as subjective as they were when I first scribbled down a few ramshackle notes in order to remind myself just how much fun I’d had watching Blazing Saddles whilst dressed as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. How else do you explain the fact that I honestly think the eighties Hollywood romp Breathless, starring Richard Gere, is better than Jean-Luc Godard’s epochal nouvelle vague masterpiece À bout de souffle?

  Really.

  Oh, I could give you loads of explanatory guff about how Jim McBride’s ridiculous remake is more of an honest rock’n’roll picture than Godard’s over-praised original; how the use of LA locations is really striking and original; how Gere’s preening gambler-on-the-run is a more entertaining self-regarding anti-hero then Belmondo. I could even sell you a line about how McBride’s recurrent use of the Silver Surfer riff is a clear forerunner of the films of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino that were to look so modern in their trash-culture obsessions over a decade later. But the truth is that I first saw Breathless at a cheap screening in South Manchester one Saturday evening when I was in a terrifically good mood for reasons which I cannot now remember, and only caught up with À bout de souffle years later as part of a belated and somewhat gruelling attempt to fill the massive gaps in my film knowledge because by then I was working as a ‘proper critic’. As a consequence, I have rather fonder memories of Breathless, even though I know in my heart that it is the lesser piece, because the first time I saw it felt less like work and more like fun. Also, I have always had a pathetic soft spot for Richard Gere, and the image of him singing along to Jerry Lee Lewis while sporting a frankly terrible array of trousers and Cuban heels just fills me with joy every time. So, if you ask me as a ‘proper film critic’ whether you should watch Breathless or À bout de souffle, I will tell you that while I wouldn’t wish to make your viewing choices for you and the weight of academic history is clearly with the latter, frankly I’ll take the former any day.

  This sort of rampant subjectivity and lack of authoritative judgement is often frowned upon by those who believe that critics should be somehow impartial, but the truth is that, to a greater or lesser degree, every critic is constantly guilty of letting their personal feelings get the better of them. This doesn’t matter when you’re a 12-year-old writing reviews for no one’s benefit but your own. But is it different if your reviews are read by others out there in the ‘real world’? Do your responsibilities change if your potential audience extends beyond the confines of your own bedroom?

  Well, yes and no.

  Back in October 2010, a YouGov poll was published which concluded (amazingly) that I am the ‘most trusted’ film critic in the UK. Yes, you read that right: most trusted. Go figure. Apparently, three times as many people trust my judgement above all others on movie-related matters as the number that trust Empire or Total Film, the country’s best-selling movie magazines. It sounds like a ringing endorsement until you discover that the huge tidal wave of assured popularity upon which I surfed constituted a mere 3 per cent of people polled. Just think about that – the most trusted film critic in the country is trusted by only 3 per cent of the population. Admittedly, governments have claimed landslide victories on dodgier statistics than that (we are currently being ruled by a coalition for whom nobody voted), but even my old sparring partner Alastair Campbell would have to concede that such a result hardly constitutes a popular mandate. In case maths isn’t your strong point, that statistic means that for every three people who think ‘Mark Kermode loved/hated that film, therefore it must be great/rubbish’, there are 97 others who think:

  a) I disagree with Mark Kermode on everything so that film’s probably rubbish/great.

  b) I don’t care what Mark Kermode thinks about anything; he’s more annoying than Mick Hucknall (see previous book).

  c) Who the hell is Mark Kermode?

  Indeed, rather than proving that I am the most trusted film critic in the country, the YouGov poll merely suggests that the public don’t trust film critics – any film critics – full stop.

  This is as it should be. Anyone who believes that an individual critic’s personal responses to a film are in any way definitive is a fool. No matter how much people blather on about certain reviewers having the ‘popular touch’, the fact is that you cannot second-guess anyone else’s reaction to a movie. This being the case, the only honest thing to do is to be upfront about your personal prejudices and allow the reader, listener or viewer to pick their way through your opinions, duly warned.

  Yet while your opinions may be yours and yours alone, the job of ‘proper’ film criticism does also require a degree of factual and historical research and accuracy that is anything but subjective, and without which those opinions are nothing but hot air. For example, imagine you’re in a pub with someone you’ve never met before and about whom you know nothing other than the fact that they seem friendly enough. Somehow the topic of conversation turns to movies. You ask them what they’ve seen recently, and they reply, ‘I’ve just been to see Saw VII and it’s rubbish.’ After politely correcting them on the issue of the
title (‘Ah, you mean Saw 3D, aka Saw: The Final Chapter, aka Saw 3D: The Final Chapter’) your first follow-up question should be: ‘And what did you think of the other six?’ If they reply that they haven’t seen any of the previous Saw franchise instalments, then you may conclude that:

  a) they are not part of the film’s target demographic;

  b) they don’t like horror films; or,

  c) they are a person of discernment and taste who recognised Saw 3D as the rubbish it so clearly is.

  Crucially, you have no idea which of these propositions is true and therefore you have no way of judging whether this person’s pithily expressed opinion has any merit or weight. If, however, they reply that they have seen all seven of the Saw movies and thought they really tailed off after the first outing, you might conclude that:

  a) they are a glutton for punishment;

  b) they really like horror movies; or,

  c) they are a person of discernment, taste and (crucially) track record who recognised Saw 3D as the piece of rubbish it so clearly is.

  The point is not that someone who hasn’t seen all the Saw movies has no right to think that Saw 3D is rubbish, nor indeed that such an opinion should not be entirely sound, merely that one might reasonably wonder about the basis on which that opinion was reached.

  At the end of April 2010 I did an onstage event with writer and critic Kim Newman, who probably knows more about horror movies than anyone. Kim had recently updated his essential work Nightmare Movies – an exhaustive, authoritative and extremely entertaining overview of ‘Horror on Screen Since the 1960s’ – and our talk at the BFI Southbank was to celebrate the publication of the new edition and to discuss the ways in which horror cinema had changed over the past 20 years. I was surprised to find that Kim had devoted almost an entire chapter of his new book to the legacy of Eli Roth’s Hostel movies, which I found depressingly dull but which he argued were an important cornerstone of the contemporary horror market. Crucially, Kim didn’t say he actively liked either Hostel or Hostel: Part II, or indeed the slew of so-called ‘torture porn’ slashers into which subgenre the Saw sequels also fell. But simply not liking a movie didn’t mean that it could merely be dismissed or ignored, at least not for a film critic whose reputation is built upon an encyclopaedic wealth of knowledge. And, according to Kim, ‘like it or not, Hostel was the most significant horror film of 2005’.