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| From the delightful ongoing comic book series Giant Days. I have a similar process for writing these reviews. |
Who is Mark Kermode? Kermode is, for my money, one of the sharpest critics alive, an astute cinephile and an indisputably entertaining reviewer in his own right. He’s a noted academic, his favorite film is The Exorcist, and he is – with Simon Mayo – a presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live’s “Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review.” He’s the chief critic for The Observer, has authored a number of books (both high-brow academic and more widely accessible), carries a PhD in English (much like yours truly), and plays double bass in a skiffle band.
Mark Kermode loves film, but there are a number of movies for which he simply doesn’t care. In that respect, he’s responsible for making short videos – filmed podcasts of his radio show – that are often more entertaining than the films he’s reviewing. He’s pithy and punchy, clever and well-read, a gifted(ish) impressionist, and an endearing personality whose adoration of cinema is matched only by his engagingly effusive disdain for movies that get it wrong. To that end, we present “The Top 10 Kermodean Rants [aka The British Do It Better].”
Note: The rants below are (almost exclusively) for films that Kermode rejected; if you’d like to see what it’s like when The Good Doctor approves, check out his reviews for Skyfall and The Dark Knight Rises. You will find a reverence and a depth of thinking that demand a second viewing of the films (or perhaps, like me, you’ll find yourself nodding along in approval, as you’ve seen this films easily a dozen times over).
Honorable Mention. Run For Your Wife (2012)
“I’ve always found it completely easy to laugh at Danny Dyer. Laughing with Danny Dyer is a completely different matter.”
I’ve not seen Run For Your Wife, and after seeing this rant I’m not convinced I need to. Indeed, I can’t say that I need to see any movie with Danny Dyer, solely on the strength of Kermode’s screeching, squelching impression of Dyer (“Oi! Danny Doy-ah!”). Danny Dyer is one of Kermode’s standby impressions (probably matched only by how many times he’s appended “And hello to Jason Isaacs” at the end of a sentence), and so any Kermode list would be incomplete without a cameo appearance by this deranged Cockney hardman. There’s also a good moment where we see the dynamic at work between Kermode and Simon Mayo, who properly tees up Kermode’s joke about “the secret of comedy.”
10. CHiPs (2017)
“It makes the television series seem like Ibsen. It’s horrible.”
No true Kermodean rant begins without a long silence and a sigh. From there, Kermode can go one of two ways – either he’ll launch into a good-humored dissection or he’ll rail against the conditions of the world that forced him to endure the latest cinematic indignity. CHiPs, which Kermode dubs “offensively rubbish,” is certainly a case of the latter. Kermode is offended by the film but can’t muster the strength to rail a full-force invective against it, and he and Mayo insightfully note the difference between a well-crafted joke in bad taste and a joke that fails on every level. “The sheer ineptitude of it is really quite staggering,” he laments, turning in an all-time classic line comparing CHiPs to Ibsen.
9. Angels & Demons (2009)
“It is the stupidest film I can remember seeing . . . It is intergalactically stupid . . . It is stupid in ways that you could not possibly imagine.”
Kermode’s not a fan of Dan Brown, and while I almost included his lamentation about the failure of The Da Vinci Code, his takedown of Angels & Demons goes one better by repeating many of his earlier criticisms while proving that Kermode is as deft with a thesaurus as he is with a winding analogy. In case you hadn’t noticed, Kermode found Angels & Demons stupid, but his ability to find three potent variations of that observation is frankly staggering. “Why would any of this be happening?” he asks of the film’s outlandish plot. Kudos to Mayo, who interrupts the rant with the pivotal and deadpan question, “Are you saying it’s not a true story?” But it’s Kermode who gets the last laugh when he asks of Ewan McGregor, “I want you to tell me, on the basis of this clip, where he’s from.”
8. Pain & Gain (2013)
“Anybody with a beating heart and soul ought to be grossly offended by the movie . . . It is not a movie for sentient breathing living beings.”
There’s no love lost between Kermode and director Michael Bay, and while I could have included any of his takedowns of the abysmal and noisy Transformers franchise, this one is especially grim because it includes such Kermode-isms as “You have put your head down the toilet of life” and “This is like swimming in a sewer, and not in a good way.” Kermode’s disgust is palpable, equaled only by his disappointment at being misled by the notion that this might be the one Michael Bay movie he actually enjoyed. Instead, Kermode failed to see the satire, remarking instead, “There is a difference between comically deconstructing something and just standing around laughing at roadkill.” I suspect we may be doing a bit of the latter, albeit vicariously through The Good Doctor’s pained expressions and strained breaths.
7. Bride Wars (2009)
“If this is not in my Top 10 Worst of the year, Top 5 Worst of the Year, then the year will have been so bad that I make you this promise – if Bride Wars isn’t in my Top 10 Worst Films of the Year, if there are ten films worse than Bride Wars, I quit.”
This rant might not have made the list were it not for the fact that this movie seems to be on television literally every night for the past year. I can’t channel-surf in peace without encountering Bride Wars, giving lie to Kermode’s exasperated remark, “You don’t have to see them. You didn’t have to sit there and watch Bride Wars.” This is precisely the kind of film I’d never want to watch, but those make the best Kermodean rants. It’s also notable because it cites Kermode’s definitive “bad casting” – “Meg Ryan is a helicopter [pronounced “helly-copter”] pilot.” If there’s an improbable casting choice, it’s always compared to Meg Ryan as a helicopter pilot. “Kate Hudson is a high-powered lawyer... nope, not having that.” Hat-tip to Mayo who inquires, “Did you deliberately choose the worst clip from the movie?”
6. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)
“The Phantom Menace was one of the worst films ever made ever, and Attack of the Clones was better than Phantom Menace, but so is, y’know, slamming your hand in the car door.”
Kermode was, with Mr. Plinkett, one of the critical voices who spurred me toward my critical about-face on the Star Wars prequels. I’d loved them as a child but now stand on the belief that they are by and large rubbish, punctuated by moments of good filmmaking that probably amounts to around eighty minutes of worthwhile product – or, as Kermode puts it, “[George Lucas] has created a two hour, twenty minute borefest of which seventeen and a half minutes are quite good.” As with Angels & Demons, Kermode weeps that much of the plotting consists of protracted scenes of dialogue, though here it carries a note of the absurd. “There are at least three occasions in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith in which characters say, ‘We must move quickly' and you sit there thinking, ‘Well, in your own time, George.’ If you want to move quickly, that would be absolutely fine because I’ve been here for two hours and twenty minutes and I am really waiting for something to start happening.” I can’t talk about these movies, though, without quoting the “car door” line because it successfully encapsulates everything I’ve thought about the prequels but never been able to vocalize.
5. Mamma Mia! (2008)
“Is that the QE2 docking or is that Pierce looking for a C? HONK!”
Here’s the closest thing you’ve got to a positive review on this list, though it’s a classic Kermodean backhanded compliment. He’ll often remark that a film is “not entirely bad” or “nowhere near as bad as it could have been,” but his bottom line on Mamma Mia takes the cake: “Mamma Mia is terrible and yet it’s one of the few movies that passes right through the wall in the Star Trek way that they reverse the polarity . . . it’s strangely wonderful.” And indeed, I think he puts his thumb, as is so often the case, on the crux of the film. It’s full of so many things that shouldn’t work, that I shouldn’t enjoy, but I too found myself strangely captivated by Mamma Mia and by the earnest manner in which Meryl Streep (or, as Kermode dubs her, Muriel Strepsil) delivers the lyrics from Abba’s greatest hits.
4. Dirty Grandpa (2016)
“I just don’t want the film to exist, I wish I hadn’t seen it, I wish I could unsee it, but I can’t. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
You may recall that last week I made the regrettable decision to review Dirty Grandpa, and it ended up being one of the worst experiences of my life within recent memory. However, my ill-advised decision to watch the movie had everything to do with Dr. Kermode’s horrorstruck review. And in my experience, he’s absolutely correct – “this is foul,” an “endless parade of crass vulgarity.” I’ve been watching Kermode for years, and I can honestly say this is the most broken I’ve ever seen him. He is genuinely saddened by the existence of the film, and it seems it’s ruined Robert De Niro for him forever. And Dr. Kermode, my friend, that makes two of us.
3. Entourage (2015)
“Well, it’s no surprise, I do hate it.”
Kermode found this one “loathsome” and bemoaned its “moral torpor” and “utter vacuity.” Truthfully, no one spins a linguistic sneer like Mark Kermode, who called Entourage a “syrupy corpulent foul display.” We get a classic Kermodean comparison when he remarks, “In terms of its gender politics, Human Centipede is more sensitive,” which is a staggeringly despondent observation. If we felt his anguish at Dirty Grandpa, we sense a sharpened hatred for Entourage and everything it represents. “I would cross the road not to be on the same street as these people.”
2. Sex and the City 2 (2010)
“My expectations were low, and I have to say they were met. It’s ghastly.”
Only The Good Doctor could go into Sex and the City 2 and come out with a scathing Marxist critique about “filthy lucre” and “consumerist pornography.” Who could forget his rewriting of the feminist slogan as “I am woman! I buy shoes!” or his complete horror at the film’s portrayal of women as “imperialist American pig-dogs of the highest order”? It’s a moment where I feel pity, abject pity for professional critics who are forced to sit through dreck like this when I’ve got the liberty to review Batman v Superman for the eighth time or just generate a Top 10 list like this one. But then again I’ve never come up with a line as punchy as Kermode’s description of Mr. Big, “who in order to be funding this apartment must be an arms dealer.”
1. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007)
“Really, if you go and pay money to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s your own fault, and you're bringing down the collapse of Western civilization.”
The Good Doctor and I don’t always see eye to eye. He notoriously put the aforementioned Dawn of Justice on his “Top 10 Worst of 2016” list (tied at 10th with Suicide Squad). And in the case of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, films which I love and famously listed on my Personal Canon, Kermode hates them with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. He might even hate them more than the Transformers movies, which is really quite a feat. But he saves all his fury and vitriol for the third installment, which features “the magisterial talent of Orloondo Bland” and “Ikea Knightley,” whose on-screen chemistry constitutes “a petrified forest of woodenness” – “it’s like watching two chairs mating!” There are so many more quotable gems in that review, but the standout feature is that Kermode powers on so forcefully that cohost Simon Mayo is left speechless, reads his paper, and indeed vacates his post while Kermode rains down righteous indignation for more than ten minutes. Mayo has delightful rapport with Kermode, but he knows to stay out of the line of fire when The Good Doctor is in. I’m almost more excited for Kermode’s imminent review than for the new Pirates movie next month.
You can find the rest of Mark Kermode’s reviews at his YouTube channel, kermodeandmayo, and wherever else fine film criticism is dispensed. You can find more of my reviews on this blog, where I promise more film reviews are coming, the Batman: The Animated Series reviews continue on Wednesday, and “10 @ a Time” will debut later this year.
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