The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  After scrabbling around on the internet, I discovered that the author of this quote is ‘the most read, most watched, most listened to showbiz reporter in the world’, which surprised me because I’d never heard of him, and had therefore assumed that he’d been made up by the film’s publicity department. This does happen. In 2001, Newsweek journalist John Horn revealed that a writer named ‘David Manning’, who had long been supplying enthusiastic quotes for lousy movies, was in fact a fictional character conjured from thin air by a movie marketing executive. Manning, who supposedly worked for The Ridgefield Press (a real local newspaper, which had no knowledge of the scam), was quoted as having written rave reviews of titles such as the grisly Rob Schneider comedy The Animal, an appalling affair which made me understand how a fox can chew its own leg off in order to escape a hideous ordeal of entrapment, but which Manning more charitably called ‘Another winner!’ (I have a ridiculous theory that the reliably awful Schneider has photographs of Adam Sandler doing unspeakable things with farmyard animals, because I can’t come up with any other explanation as to why the super-successful Sandler keeps giving him roles in his movies.) Manning also lavished praise upon Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man, a severely compromised studio product that the director himself later told me should more rightly have been called ‘Hollow Film’, but one with which Manning could find no fault. Other duds championed by Manning included The Patriot and Vertical Limit, prompting a lawsuit from two Californian film-goers who brought a class action on behalf of all those who had been duped into watching bad movies via the ‘international and systematic deception of consumers’. ‘We’re horrified,’ said Susan Tick, spokeswoman for Columbia’s parent company Sony, whose damage-limitation exercise reportedly involved agreeing to refund dissatisfied customers to the tune of $1.5 million. In a rare moment of humour Joe Roth, whose Revolution studios had produced The Animal, got the last laugh by balefully telling reporters, ‘If [Manning] doesn’t exist, he should at least have given us a better quote!’

  The Manning affair opened up a whole can of worms about the ways in which critics’ ‘quotes’ are used by film companies to (mis-)sell their product. ‘The real question,’ observed Horn astutely, ‘is why Sony had to conceive the counterfeit critic to begin with, given the world of movie junkets, where normal reporting standards don’t apply.’ Horn went on to describe an ‘all-expenses-paid gravy train where the studios give journalists free rooms and meals at posh hotels and the reporters return the favor with puffy celebrity profiles and enthusiastic review blurbs. No one complains, and bad movies end up with great quotes … Reading the glowing newspaper-ad recommendations for even the lamest movie, you might wonder if those quoted critics are real. Unlike Manning, they are.’

  Certainly the writer who was so impressed by Run, Fatboy, Run was real, with a real website on which he described himself as a ‘presenter, journalist, gossip guru, and global showbiz king’ – although crucially not a critic, an important factor when assessing his description of the film as ‘simply perfect’. Perfect? Citizen Kane is perfect. Some Like It Hot is perfect. Toy Story is perfect. David Cronenberg’s Crash is perfect. But Run, Fatboy, Run? In what universe is that perfect? I guarantee you that even the people who made the movie would concede that it is at best patchy. But taken at face value, that quote attests that Run, Fatboy, Run could not be improved upon in any way whatsoever (the definition of ‘perfect’); it was not only the best laugh-fest of the year but the very Platonic ideal of an immaculate comedy film, putting actor-turned-director David Schwimmer (the horse-faced one from Friends) up there with Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen.

  This is, of course, symptomatic of the key difference between film criticism and showbiz reporting. A showbiz reporter can call a film as average as Run, Fatboy, Run ‘perfect’ since it is part of their job is to be a ‘friend of the stars’ and to be enthusiastic about the wonderful ‘world of show’. The problem occurs when the line between critic and ‘gossip guru’ becomes blurred, as I believe it did on that poster. To be clear, this is not the fault of the gossip guru, who may indeed be at the very forefront of their profession, but of the marketing department who were clearly trying to pass his words off as some form of bona fide critical endorsement.

  Of course, critics can be every bit as unreasonably gushing as gossip gurus. Chris Tookey, long-standing film critic for the Daily Mail, runs a jolly website that ranks the critical community’s Top 30 ‘Quote Whores’, measured by a peculiar ‘flying pig’ count which awards airborne porkers for reviews that (in Tookey’s opinion) ‘grossly exaggerate a film’s merits [in] a shameless bid to be on the poster’. Thus a review describing Pearl Harbor as ‘Fantastic! More gripping than Gladiator, more tear-jerking than Titanic and, unlike a lot of recent historical epics, honest and accurate’ earns a maximum three flying pigs.

  But, as ever, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Even the most cynical critic will have experienced the strange thrill of championing a movie they really love and then somehow basking in the reflected glory of a publicity campaign that uses their words of praise for promotional purposes. On the comparatively few occasions that my name has appeared on ads for movies I really like, I confess to feeling pathetically proud, and never more so than when posters for the 25th-anniversary re-release of The Exorcist appeared in 1998, bearing the legend ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Made – Mark Kermode, Radio 1’. This may seem to you like an abject act of quote-whoredom that puts all others in the shade and should send me immediately to the top of Tookey’s list. The difference (in my opinion at least) is that I really meant it. I really do think The Exorcist is the very best thing produced by the first century of cinema, and it is an opinion I have been proudly espousing not just for years, but for decades. If you know anything about me at all, you’ll know that I’m the guy who’s seen The Exorcist over 200 times and won’t stop going on about how great it really is. Plus, there’s a deliberate act of belligerent militancy about my claim that it is the greatest movie ever made as opposed to merely the greatest horror movie ever made, a reaction to the dreary assumption that no horror movie could possibly be that ‘great’ in the first place. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with me about this (and very few do); what matters is whether I agree with me – and believe me, I do. Wholeheartedly. So when that quote appeared on the poster and everyone laughed, it bothered me not one jot. It’s something I believe to be true, and I would be happy for it to be carved on my tombstone.

  Would the same be true of those quotes for Pearl Harbor or Run, Fatboy, Run? Well, maybe. As I said before, all judgements are subjective and it is entirely possible that both those movies have defenders as staunch as those of any other canonised classic. I know people who were ridiculed for giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up to Caddyshack when it first came out and who, with hindsight, now look like the smartest kids in class. I have already fessed up to an abiding love of Breathless which few could countenance back in the mid-eighties, but which contrary view I now discover (to my shame) that I share with Quentin Tarantino. One of my very favourite critics of all time, Philip French, is among the many who have argued passionately for the wholescale reassessment of Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate which he considers to be a wrongly maligned classic, something which gives me pause for thought every time I casually malign it once again. After all, if someone as well versed in the history of the Western as Philip thinks there’s merit in Cimino’s lavish folly, then am I not missing something?

  The question, as always, is the context in which such praise is offered. Does the writer have anything to gain by being overly positive about movies – or anything to lose by being honestly critical of them? Are their reactions based upon a hard-earned bedrock of film knowledge that may cause one to reassess one’s own personal responses, or are they merely the burblings of an easily pleased dilettante whose senses have been dulled by the lowered expectations we encountered in Chapter Two?

  Or are they just trying to get their name on the
poster?

  These are questions that you should ask yourself every time you see a critic (or indeed a gossip guru) quoted on an advertisement for a forthcoming movie. Who said this? Why did they say it? What are the grounds upon which they said it? Did they really say it? (Clue: the more ‘…’s in any given quote, the more likely it is that they didn’t.) And, most importantly, have they said the same thing before in relation to other movies that really didn’t deserve it?

  As for film-makers, their professed disdain for critics may be understandable but it is also utterly self-serving. Reading Kevin Smith’s ‘power to the people’ declaration that he’d had it with critics and would, in future, let the ticket-buying punters judge his work reminded me of producer Jerry Weintraub’s bold announcement in the mid-1990s that he was refusing to press-screen his abysmal reboot of The Avengers because he believed, from the very bottom of his heart, that the ‘fans’ had a right to see it first. Weintraub is an entertaining showman (he promoted Elvis concerts back in the day) who had somehow wound up backing William Friedkin’s much-picketed eighties thriller Cruising. Friedkin tells a terrific story about Weintraub inviting Richard Heffner, then chairman of the American ratings board, to an early screening of Cruising, in which Al Pacino plays a cop who goes undercover in the heady world of New York’s gay S&M scene and discovers his own dormant (and possibly murderous) sexuality. A forerunner of Basic Instinct (which provoked similarly overcooked responses from the politically correct community), Cruising boasted cinéma-vérité scenes shot in clubs around the Christopher Street district of Greenwich Village to which Friedkin had gained access dressed only in a jockstrap. It was here that he witnessed (and filmed) scenes of fisting, golden showers and other variants of young men in leather chaps getting along famously in the vibrant days before the spectre of AIDS reared its hideous head. The resulting movie, which offers an eye-opening account of a largely secretive world, was one of Friedkin’s finest – although he admits that his wife hates it and can’t understand why the hell he made it in the first place. Certainly it brought him nothing but trouble, expressed nowhere more clearly than during that first screening for Richard Heffner.

  According to all reports, Heffner was in a state of anxiety from the get-go, sweating bullets during the opening scene in which cop Joe Spinell and his police partner enjoy each other’s company with truncheons whilst spreadeagled upon the bonnet of a squad car and singing ‘I’m going to Ka-a-a-a-a-nsas City!’ During the club scenes, Heffner was horrified: repeatedly loosening his collar, unhitching his tie and all but gasping for breath. By the time the screening finished, he was a man barely alive.

  And then the lights went up …

  ‘So?’ said Weintraub, ever the optimist. ‘Whaddya think?’

  ‘What do I think?’ replied Heffner, aghast. ‘What do I think?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Weintraub, still defiantly upbeat. ‘Whaddya think of the movie?’

  Heffner was speechless. ‘Jerry, I just don’t know where to begin,’ he conceded. ‘I thought it was … awful.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ shot back Weintraub, unfazed, ‘but what about the rating? What rating will it get?’

  ‘Rating?!’ cried Heffner, incredulous. ‘Jerry, there aren’t enough Xs in the world to rate this movie …’

  And so the cutting began, starting with the removal of that now-legendary ‘Kansas City’ sequence. And when the reviews of Cruising started to come in, claiming that the movie made no sense, audiences were subtly directed toward the censorious carnage that followed after that first fateful screening (and the further cutting that ensued at the hands of the BBFC in Britain), suggesting that the baffling ellipses and ambiguities that were always present in the script (of which I have a copy) were somehow the result of censorious fiddling, and not the fault of the film-makers at all.

  If only the fans had got to see the movie first …

  Which brings us back to The Avengers. Word that the movie was a stinker had leaked out months in advance, with those who had toiled to pull it together in the editing room unanimous in their utter disdain for the project. But Weintraub was a pro, and predictably his interviews turned out to be infinitely more entertaining than his solidly uninteresting movie, which (as promised) the public got to see first. The fact that they all hated it when they finally saw it mattered not a bit – everyone knew the film sucked, most of all Weintraub surely, which was precisely why he had refused to let the press set eyes on the damned thing. But, credit where it’s due, he had somehow turned adversity to his advantage – at least for the opening weekend, which is, sadly, all that matters nowadays.

  As for Kevin Smith, he has duly recovered from the debacle of Cop Out and returned to his creative roots with the potentially more interesting Red State, a low-budget horror thriller which he has chosen to finance and distribute independently. This is a bold move, which arguably vindicates his claim to be turning his back on ‘the whole system’ and reminds us of the punky forthrightness that first made Clerks such a foul-mouthed treat. More power to him. But for an awkward moment surrounding the release of Cop Out, he was just another coasting film-maker blaming critics for the poor reviews of work which he (like Jerry Weintraub) should have known full well to be unworthy of his talents. And like so much comparable trash, Cop Out would later become a best-seller on DVD, where (as we have previously noted) even the most abysmal theatrical flops can recoup their losses if they feature an A-list star. This doesn’t mean they’re good films – it just means that DVD renters tend to have a more completist attitude toward star vehicles than their big-screen counterparts. For a film featuring an A-list actor to die on DVD would be almost unthinkable in the current marketplace – even a film as lousy as Cop Out. But the DVD success did at least give Smith the opportunity to claim once again that the critics didn’t know what they were talking about, so to be fair he got the last laugh.

  Meanwhile, film-makers and distributors continue to use the press to sell their product to the public, and (much as we may hate to admit it) film criticism is as much a part of that process as the puff pieces, promos and pathetic personality profiles that some of us profess to despise. And like those gluttonous ‘celebrities’ who court tabloid attention whilst whoring their sorry arses around town to flog stuff, and then complain about ‘invasion of privacy’ when they get papped in circumstances beyond their media-savvy control, film-makers can only legitimately complain about negative film criticism if they have never used a critic’s words to endorse their product. In which case, I’ll make the following deal with any film-maker willing to take it: I will agree to pay to see every one of your movies from hereon in, as long as you respect my right to say whatever the hell I like about them and you don’t use my words – positive or negative – to endorse whatever product you’re hawking at the time. That means that if I say your next film is ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Made – Yes, Even Better Than The Exorcist!’ you agree never to repeat that comment in print, in broadcast, in conversation – in fact, in any situation in which it might conceivably encourage the passingly curious to go see for themselves what all the fuss is about. It’s a ‘no pain, no gain’ solution: you don’t suffer the pain of dishing out free tickets to a disrespectful freeloader like me; nor do you enjoy the possible gain of quoting me if I really like your movie; nor even (as we have seen) if I really don’t like your movie, but your publicists want to quote me in a way which gives the entirely false impression that I really like your movie.

  Deal?

  Thought not.

  Which brings us back to square one and the as yet unanswered question – what the hell are critics for?

  Some deluded souls still believe that critics, with their sniping highbrow opinions (or, increasingly, with their babbling lowbrow lack of opinions) can actually damage a movie’s box-office takings, a view that is frankly laughable. As we have already seen, critical opinion plays almost no role in the marketability of blockbuster movies, as demonstrated by the fact that the top end of the
blockbuster charts is regularly dominated by movies which critics (or at least ‘proper’ critics) have canned. Take, for example, the case of Sex and the City 2, a movie which goes some way toward justifying the global resentment against America and the English-speaking world. If you haven’t seen it (and if you’re reading this book I sincerely hope that you haven’t), SATC2 follows the adventures of four staggeringly wealthy Americans who go on an all-expenses-paid jolly to Abu Dhabi – where they assert their right to buy shoes, patronise the impoverished locals and have sex in public places – under the guise of offering two hours of frothy women’s-lib-lite entertainment. Imagine Carry On Up the Khyber minus the sparkling wit and understated observational humour, but with a cranked-up budget, glistening marketing campaign, and jaw-droppingly overstretched (and under-edited) running time. Got that? Good. Now hit yourself hard and repeatedly about the face and neck with a wooden rolling pin, and carry on doing so for a couple of hours. By the time you’re finished you’ll still be nowhere near imagining the dark-hearted Kurtzian horror of SATC2.

  A spin-off from the hugely popular (and, I am reliably informed, engagingly empowering) TV series, SATC2 began life as a complicated financial transaction predicated upon a series of professional prenuptial agreements between Hollywood agents who were only in it for the money. Nothing wrong with that – many great Hollywood movies have been made by people with little or no interest in art but an obsessive–compulsive desire to be paid obscene amounts of cash for doing absolutely zip. Yet few Hollywood movies have managed quite so perfectly to crystallize what’s wrong with processed, mainstream multiplex fodder, and to demonstrate so thoroughly the foul financial imperative that turns undiscerning ticket-buying into an act of casual cultural vandalism. As I said when the first Sex and the City movie was released, if you pay to watch this ugly corporate drivel, then don’t come crying to me when they make an even-worse sequel with the money you gave them the first time round. In essence, anyone who bought a ticket for SATC1 is in some small way to blame for the crimes of SATC2 – and if you’re one of those people, then on some level this is your fault.