Kermode - Hatchet job: love movies, hate critics

So tell me, how did you love the picture?

Samuel Goldwyn

Forrest Gump on a tractor.

Those five words are probably my favourite film review ever. More importantly, they constitute the most damaging hatchet job I ever encountered, managing to do something I had often argued was impossible to kill a movie stone dead. I didnt read them in a newspaper or on a blog, I didnt hear them on the radio or television; rather, they were whispered in my ear by a trusted friend and colleague, David Cox, as the house lights went down on a screening of David Lynchs The Straight Story.

Id been really looking forward to that movie. Ive been a huge Lynch fan ever since being blindsided by a late-night screening of Eraserhead at the Phoenix East Finchley in the late seventies. Id wept buckets at The Elephant Man, taken several runs at Dune (it still doesnt work), been both outraged and strangely exhilarated by Blue Velvet, swooned at Wild at Heart and even argued that Mullholland Dr. makes perfect sense. Now, there was something illicitly thrilling about the fact that the high-priest of weird had pulled the most audacious trick of all hed made a straight movie, a film praised for its simplicity, lack of outlandish visual and aural experimentation, and almost wilful adherence to strict narrative linearity. Like Johnny Rotten turning up in a suit and tie, this was the one thing Lynch aficionados didnt expect, a movie with a beginning, a middle and an end and in that order. And what about that title? Initially everyone assumed it to be ironic, but reports from those who had seen The Straight Story were that it was anything but. This was Lynchs masterstroke, like that line in The Usual Suspects about the devils greatest trick being to convince people that he didnt exist. Was this Lynch as the devil in disguise? Or had he finally followed Laura Palmer to take his place amongst the angels?

All these questions were rushing through my head as we sat there in the Curzon Soho, quivering with anticipation. I was ready of spirit, willing of heart, and open of mind. I wanted only to be ravished. Instead, I was rubbished, brought low from the lofty heights of expectation by five words that sucked all the life out of the movie and left it writhing in silent space before the curtains had even opened. That poor kid hearing that Shoeless Joe Jacksons team-mates had thrown the World Series (Say it aint so!) couldnt have suffered any more crushing a sense of loss and disappointment than I did when David Cox slipped that insidiously low-key invective into my loppylugs and let it crawl like a radioactive earwig into my cerebral cortex, where it sat, pustulent, eating its evil way into anything that vaguely resembled hope, admiration or generosity. Instead, I found myself possessed only of the spirit of sneering cynicism as I endured the next two hours in which an old man swapped homely platitudes with folksy caricatures whilst making his extremely slow way across America in the absence of a full driving licence.

Forrest Gump on a fucking tractor indeed.

Whats particularly evil about the effect those words had on my state of mind is that I actually really like Forrest Gump (and Im quite partial to tractors too although what Richard Farnsworth actually drives in the movie is technically a lawnmower). While many other lazy left-leaning liberals of which I am one were merrily slagging off Bob Zemeckiss Oscar winner as some kind of right-wing Reaganite wet dream, celebrating old-fashioned down-home stupidity over disruptively rebellious intelligence, I always thought (as does Danny Boyle) that the outlook of any film starting with a single mother having to have sex with a headmaster in order to ensure a decent education for her special-needs son was anything but rose-tinted. For me, seeing Forrest Gump as some kind of neo-con tract was a perfect example of what happens when film theory gets in the way of film-viewing; when people start reading movies rather than watching them. If you really want to judge something by what it looks like on the page, go read a book. As for cinema, its a slippery audio-visual medium which, at its best, is ill served by mean-spirited reductionist critiques.

Yet as wrong-headed as they may be, mean-spirited reductionist critiques can be really funny, particularly if served up in a pithy one-liner that pierces the heart of the movie and bursts its shimmering creative bubble, like Forrest Gump on a tractor the best/worst film review I ever heard. Today, David Cox says he wishes hed never uttered the five words I have carried around with me ever since. He insists he didnt mean anything by them, that it was just a silly joke, not to be taken seriously, and certainly not to be held up as a reason to hate Lynchs low-gear road-movie. Hey, according to David, he really likes The Straight Story and if he can get over that damned phrase, why the hell cant I?

The answer is simple: no matter how much you love a film and how many good notices it gets, its the bad reviews that stick. Always. I have first-hand experience of this phenomenon. I am a film critic, and for all the movies I love and praise and try to get other people to be enthusiastic about, its the ones I hate that people remember. Take a look at my reviews on the Kermode and Mayo YouTube channel, where the numbers speak for themselves. No matter how upbeat and excitable I may be about any number of films, the reviews to which people are drawn are my bilious rants Pirates of the Caribbean, Sex and the City 2, the complete works of Michael Bay the angrier the better, apparently. Sometimes, listeners to the BBC Radio 5 live Film Review show actually get disappointed if I dont get angry enough, feeling let down by the expectation of hearing a movie get a really good spittle-spewing kicking only to be fobbed off with an uninterested dismissal or (more disappointing still) a few words of measured praise. For better or worse, those who read or listen to film reviews have a fondness for vitriol, a sobering truth not lost on critics themselves; no wonder Dorothy Parkers bitchy assessment of Katharine Hepburn running the gamut of emotions from A to B remains perhaps the most oft-quoted review in movie critic circles a killer line we all wish we had written, even if few of us agree with its sentiment.

I once asked viewers of my BBC video-blog, Kermode Uncut, to let me know their own favourite celluloid massacres, the pithier, funnier and nastier the better. The response was typically overwhelming in under forty-eight hours I received well over a hundred suggestions of succinctly splenetic put-downs, which provided hours of sour-spirited delight. In the blog, I had cited the now infamous reviews of Psycho (Sicko) and I Am A Camera (Me No Leika), both of which adorn the front cover of Daily Mail film critic Chris Tookeys compendium of film writing savagery through the ages, both being notable for their economy of wordage, if not their critical judgement. Inspired, blog commenters proffered a number of one- or two-worders, such as Leonard Maltins verdict on Isnt it Romantic? (No), Empire magazines punning assessment of Battleship (Miss), and the advice offered severally regarding the live-action Flintstones movie (Yabbadabba-Dont). After three hours of watching Exodus, Mort Sahl delivered the succinct critical cri de coeur Let my people go!, which is good, but isnt quite as funny as his summation of