Mark Kermode, history will relate, is a man with an appropriately cinematic origin: his name, look, and place in cultural life are clearly the result of a failed experiment with a matter transporter in which the genomes of Frank Kermode and Mark Lamarr were accidentally spliced. Here is an erudite critic with a proper appreciation of schlock; a celluloid-loving fogey who candidly prefers Breathless to À Bout de Souffle; and a man with the vanity to sport a quiff, yet who identifies himself as a jowly doppelgänger for Richard Nixon. This is the book of his mid-life crisis. If he's been a film critic for a quarter of a century (and, what's more, the "most trusted" in the UK according to a 2010 YouGov poll), what's the point of his existence when Sex and the City 2 is a smash hit?
Kermode's style is talky to a fault. He frequently says things such as: "Listen " or "You want to hear the argument? Well, I'm going to tell you anyway. It goes something like this " He also rambles to a tedious extent: a mention of Zac Efron sparks a narky digression on Marlon Brando, which involves a parenthesis on "South-African-born director Richard Stanley", then an anecdote from David Thewlis, before returning to Efron, before jumping off again like Maverick banging his wheels on the deck before going to get Cougar in the opening sequence in Top Gun. An editor should have stamped on all that nonsense. Because when you get past it, Kermode has nutsy-boltsy knowledge, fierce and idiosyncratic enthusiasms, a great bullshit detector and some very interesting things to say. Not all those things are upbeat; he surveys the landscape of mainstream cinema and sees a loveless corporate wasteland in which you pay the thick end of 20 quid to watch an expensively made bad film in an overpriced fast-food joint.
His central complaint is this: if it is more or less impossible for blockbuster movies starring A-list celebrities to lose money (and he explains, with special reference to Waterworld, Cleopatra and Heaven's Gate, how it is), why do they have to be so crap? Would it hurt to give them a decent script, proper actors, and so on? That event movies have to play safe by insulting the intelligence of their audience is, he says, a canard: event movies are about the only ones that can afford to take risks. If you really want to lose money, make an independently funded, middlebrow art-house movie.
To make my locus standi clear, I've a lower brow than Kermode. I've never seen a Michael Bay film I haven't liked; though admittedly I haven't seen Pearl Harbor having been warned off it by the trailers, the poster, all the reviews, the love theme in Team America: World Police ("Pearl Harbor Sucked (And I Miss You)") and every fibre of my being. But I even liked Transformers. Scratch that: I especially liked Transformers. Nevertheless, Kermode's on to something. Transformers could have been better still.
An interesting point he makes, though little teased out, is that although you can't go wrong with spectacle, humour is a risk. Throw enough money at a po-faced exploding helicopter flick, and audiences will show up; but a lame comedy will properly tank. That says something, perhaps, about the nature of cinema.
The current 3-D frenzy, Kermode argues, is something imposed on the public rather than demanded by it, and therefore doomed to fail, as did previous 3-D fads before it. Its purpose is to head off piracy, not improve product, and its legacy is headaches, rip-offs, dingy screens and widespread consumer apathy. Its technical and artistic shortcomings are ably exposed. It's a con.
Kermode explodes a good number of other myths, too. One chapter opens with a mordant juxtaposition of the "British cinema is dead" headlines around the axing of the UK Film Council, and the near-simultaneous "British cinema is reborn" headlines around the Oscar sweep for The King's Speech.
Both, he says, were horse manure. The Oscars are an institutionally corrupt American tradeshow, the "British" films that win are generally US-led co-productions about members of the royal family, and the patronage of American producer Harvey Weinstein is in almost every case the decisive issue. As for the UK Film Council, it funded Sex Lives of the Potato Men, and its money would be better spent supporting British cinemas than British cinema. What the industry needs, as a seedbed of talent, isn't earnest state-funded art-films but a thriving culture of shoestring exploitation flicks. Kermode's theme, throughout, is that the problem with the artistic product is not funding: it is distribution.
On the question of the relationship between tail and dog who's wagging? Are lousy films being imposed on a public that doesn't want them, or demanded by a public that gets the movies it deserves? Kermode equivocates a bit. But as his exuberantly righteous smackdowns of Avatar, Pearl Harbor and (especially) Sex and the City 2 demonstrate, he's not afraid to euthanise the whole mutt and let posterity trouble itself with fine distinctions.
Much that is most cherishable about this writer his enduring fan-boyishness, his nostalgia, and his slight absurdity are summed up in this one unwieldy sentence: "One of the most rewarding moments of my career came when my skiffle band, the Dodge Brothers, teamed up with Neil Brand to present a live accompaniment to the long-forgotten Louise Brooks movie Beggars of Life at a uniquely 'carbon-neutral' screening, as part of the inaugural New Forest film festival in September 2010."
Not a clause of that isn't, for reasons its author may and may not have considered, glorious. We should be glad to have him.
Sam Leith's The Coincidence Engine is published by Bloomsbury.
