Inspired by true events

"Marley and Me was crap," bursts out Mark Kermode half-way through the interview after an ill-advised comment from his interviewer—yours truly. Not a fan then? "The end is just emotional pornography. It’s ridiculous!"

It is this bluntness and his uncompromising reviews that have given Kermode—Dr Kermode to be exact, PhD in Horror Literature—a big name in film critique.

"I have a reputation for slagging things off but actually I want films to be good. I’d much rather spend 14 hours in the cinema every week watching good films than bad ones. And actually what often happens when you see a mediocre movie is that you end up finding virtue where there is none because you want to be excited, you want things to be better."

So there, his reputation despite all evidence is completely unjustified, and offended directors and film-producers should just accept that if he could not find anything in their work, perhaps they are actually just not that good at all.

"To be a good critic is to give your own response completely unmediated and be honest. You can’t skew your opinion to make it fall in line with popular taste. You can’t watch The Da Vinci Code and think 'Well this is going to make 200 million dollars and even though I think it’s about as exciting as being hit over the head by a brick, I am going to say nice things about it.' You can’t second guess the audience." A word to the wise.

However harsh or ruthless he might appear while reviewing films for newspapers, television or radio, he admits to having misjudged movies in the past and is very apologetic of his review of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet in his latest book, It’s Only a Movie, a hilarious cinematic memoir "inspired by real events".

"I stormed out of Blue Velvet the first time I saw it and wrote a very pissy review of it; about how deeply rubbish it was and all the ways in which it was politically incorrect and who the hell did Lynch think he was. A year later I went to see it again and all the things I hated about it the first time were the things I loved about it the second time. It does not happen very often but you can be wrong."

Kermode is a huge fan of The Exorcist and is not ashamed to say so, even if this has led many to discredit him as a reviewer. It's more than his favourite movie, over the years it has become an obsession - a "healthy one", supposedly. He has written a book about the film, made a documentary entitled the The Fear of God: 25 Years of 'The Exorcist', helped to create an extended version of the cult horror picture by digging up most of the discarded scenes—some kept in a salt mine—and goes on regular pilgrimages to the house where the movie is set.

"It’s the greatest movie ever made. I didn’t see it when it came out because I was too young; I only saw the trailer at the time, and it haunted me for years afterwards. I saw it at the cinema four years later. I guess I might not have been obsessed with it if I had had the chance to watch it when it came out."

You do not know what being a fan means until you have spoken to Mark Kermode. He has seen The Exorcist over two hundred times, he lost count after the first hundred, and not a day passes in which he does not think about it.

The lesson we can learn from the film critic is that there is no accounting for taste. He hated all three instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean and six epics of Star Wars as much as he loved Basic Instinct 2 and High School Musical 3. It might seem surprising, even laughable: a serious and trusted reviewer on The Culture Show is a fan of Zac Efron? Kermode’s passionate praises or criticisms and compelling arguments in favour or against every movie he has ever seen is what makes us take him seriously. He’s not here to please anyone except himself, that much is clear.

"High School Musical 3 was fantastic, though the first and second movies were awful. You see these male critics slagging off Zac Efron, but actually he is a kid who can both sing and dance in the old fashioned way, like Fred Astaire. He’s a proper performer. I met him and he was lovely, pretty self-effacing and quiet."

Kermode is certainly one of a kind. He did not own a television for years because he simply thought that anything on TV was inherently inferior to the cinema. When he finally got one, restricted to the use of videos, he made a point of destroying the aerial connection so that it wouldn’t work for any other purpose.

"I developed this theory, as so often is the case that I’d stop doing something and then I’d find a rationale for it. That all things that were good about visual entertainment was the cinema and the thing that was bad was television.

"Then there was this Guardian piece and they said 'Look this is foolish'. They gave me all these box-sets and told me to watch them and write about what I thought of them for the paper. And I watched Doctor Who which I thought was great, and also Life on Mars which was actually a turning point for me. Again I was wrong."

If you think that film reviewing is about spending your time sat on cosy cinema seats—only aisle seats for Kermode—or in comfortable radio studios, it is in fact far from a risk-free job. One of Kermode’s interviewees for the BBC, German director Werner Herzog , actually got shot right in front of him.

"That’s the only time it’s ever happened and I really hope it doesn’t happen again. We were filming outside in LA. Werner didn’t bat an eyelid and he behaved like it was the most mundane thing in the world. And he said 'Someone shot me, we’d probably better leave'. To this day, I can't quite get my head around the fact that it happened. He was bleeding but he refused to go to the hospital and insisted that it was an 'insignificant bullet'. He just took us to his house afterwards and decided to carry on with the interview there. The wound swelled up and it was a bit manky but he didn’t complain. I kept thinking during the interview 'He is going to get septicemia!' It’s on Youtube, you can see the whole thing."

The film critic is known for his knack at predicting the Oscars results. One year, he guessed all the winners before the nominations were announced. So who are the winners going to be this year?

"The way it’s going to work at the Oscars is that Avatar is going to get Best Film, Kathryn Bigelow will get Best Director, Sandra Bullock will win Best Actress, Jeff Bridges Best Actor, Mo’Nique will get Best Supporting Actress and Christopher Waltz Best Supporting Actor. Those awards ceremonies are essentially to do with the industry congratulating itself.

"I mean, do awards genuinely reflect the best things you saw last year? The best film I saw last year was Let The Right One In. The best performance I saw was Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist. Don’t get me wrong, awards are fun but you can’t take them that seriously."

It’s Only a Movie is out now.