Hatchet Job: Love Movies, Hate Critics
Mark Kermode
Picador, 256pp, £16.99
The rhino-skinned, imperturbable Stephen Fry spoke for a nation of fragile creatives when he asked, “What decent person would want to spend a life picking and cavilling?” Setting aside that there is more to arts criticism than spotting a Viking extra wearing a wristwatch, he probably won’t have professional critics – of film, music or anything – to complain about for much longer.
The internet and social media have trapped the scribbler-in-the-dark in a pincer movement. The former has pushed newspapers into such penury that editors increasingly see their arts desks as luxuries (the Independent on Sunday fired all of its critics in September). The latter offer up the prospect of a more “democratic” critical landscape, forgetting that the sales chart is a fairly democratic measure of what the public thinks and that some perspectives on works of art cannot be expressed in 140 characters.
Nevertheless, user-generated content is driving out expert or elite opinion and this is affecting the film reviewing trade in particular. “Everyone’s a critic” is no longer a Hollywood curse but a simple statement of fact. If reviewers can’t get paid, where are the next Barry Normans, Alexander Walkers and Pauline Kaels going to come from? Do we even need them?
Mark Kermode, the Observer’s cinema critic and co-host with Simon Mayo of the best movie programme available at present in any medium (Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, BBC Radio 5 Live, Fridays, 2pm), is better placed than most to ride out the twilight of the critics and understand its consequences. An educated movie man moulded by the film underground of the 1970s and 1980s – loves The Exorcist and Silent Running; hates Michael Bay and 3D projection – he still reacts to cinema with the open-minded enthusiasm of someone who sees going to the pictures as a treat.
Kermode’s technique on the radio is to scatter nuggets of theory and insight through highly amusing digressions as Mayo plays plain-speaking Ernie to his fulminating Bert. (You can tell Kermode loves cinema because it makes him so angry.) This approach works less well in print, where the reader may want to yell “cut” at overlong anecdotes about film-makers who’ve confronted the writer over a bad review.
Hatchet Job doesn’t quite deliver on the premise of its title. In fact, it’s a valiant defence of what Kermode calls proper movie criticism: writing that is thoughtful, informed and, above all, honest. Anyone who wants to read a true bestiary of harsh reviews should run, not walk, to a copy of I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie by Kermode’s hero Roger Ebert instead.
Hatchet Job is, however, entertaining. It is actually two books, intercut like Ran (if you know your Cahiers du Cinéma) or Pulp Fiction (if you don’t) into one. In the first strand, Kermode argues that because cruel reviews are undoubtedly more fun to read and to write than positive ones, the internet’s supply of ignorant snark is bound to increase. Unlike obscure tweeters, the professionals have skin in the game, be it their utility as a recommender of quality, their reputation for factual accuracy, or just their paycheque. Nobody ever got kicked off Facebook for getting stuff wrong or making stuff up about a movie.
But since the advent of the audience test screening – see Kermode’s forensic account of how the original “operatic” ending of the bunny-boiling thriller Fatal Attraction was replaced with a pandering finale to ensure that the “bitch” got her comeuppance – it’s been a given that the public is always right. Recuts based on audience or Twitter reaction would have given us a neutered Casablanca in which Rick gets the girl, Kermode argues. With critics diminished, there is one less line of defence to point out that what the audience wants is not necessarily what it needs.
This is lowering stuff but the second strand, which could be subtitled “Great Squabbles in Movie History”, leavens it. Among other detours, Kermode presents lively recaps of the feud between the maverick director Ken Russell and his nemesis, the Evening Standard’s morally upright critic Alexander Walker; and a chivalrous retelling of the erratic but probably underappreciated career of John Boorman of Deliverance fame and Zardoz infamy. His picture of a lost world of itinerant reviewers subsisting on complimentary sandwiches in screening rooms across Soho is hopelessly sentimental but, hey, so is Silent Running.
Not being clairvoyant, Kermode is unclear about what will happen to film criticism when the digital dust settles – if it ever does. I suspect that he will do what Ebert did: expand his reach through video blogs, the web and any other means to consolidate a global brand. But the world needed only one Roger Ebert and it may only need one Mark Kermode. How their successors will earn a crust, hone their trade and spread their personal brand remains to be seen.
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