sex education visual aids

right well with with that welcome we better not mess it up i've just realised two things i've just realised firstly i have the muddiest shoes in the world and i've also realised that i'm wearing minion socks [inaudible from the audience]

sex education visual aids, did i not dress myself? no i just didn't think about it at the time. you know i just, anyway. thank you everybody for coming there if you comepeople coming in squeezing in the last couple of seats, thank you all for making thein conversation series such a success you're most welcome. when i was when iwas a student here one of the philosophy

professors that some of you willremember frank choffian, american we discussed aesthetics and the role of acritic. what is a critic for? what his criticism for? it's always stuck in mymind that he was very very helpful he said "a critics role is to transform yourexperience of the work" that is one of the many reasons that i really enjoyworking with mark i first came across some reading some of this stuff and thenhearing about radio five minutes finally we managed to get him to come ontotelevision as well to do a weekly film review show and what i most like this hedoes transform my experience of the work and he does so by making judgments butnot with necessarily an attitude before

it goes into the cinema, that's at leasthow i see him. so please will you welcome our guest mark kermode kermode: thank you i'm never normally that nice no i know and i'm slightly thrown actually anyway, to business.can we start at the beginning i mean how did you... what are your firstmemories of seeing films? was it something on television was actually in the cinema? imean what do you remember first that said this is something important.

i remember very clearly the first, well the first film i can remember seeing in the cinemaso it may not be the first one the first remember seeing in the cinema was krakatoa east of java and i was taken to see it by my mum and and the really weird thing i don't know if any of you have seen krakatoa east of java, it was quite a big film it came out the thing everybodyknows about it is krakatoa isn't east of java it's west of java, so it's one of those great mistakefilm titles but that the weird thing was i saw it as a kid and i loved itand it's you know action and adventure and balloons and you know volcanoes andsea and all that sort of stuff but but the weird thing was i just had thisreally weird little memory of a scene in

it that seemed to have nothing to dowith volcanoes or balloons or sea of and it was weird i remember it as being a womanin a courset, seriously, singing a song to a bloke who appeared to be lying on abed in the state of drunkenness or something i was a kid anyway so i hadn'tseen the film for ages and ages and when i was writing my first book i went back to see it because one of thethings i tend to do is i tend to misremember things a lot i misrememberfilms that i've seen, i misremember scenes from one film being in another film so for ages i thought thatthere was a sequence in battle for the planet of the apes which i'd seen thetrailer for battle of the planet the apes in which one of the apes add to the otherapes but i want to love you now

and i saw battle forthe planet the apes that scene isn't in it i mean it isn't in it. it really troubled me becausei kept waiting for the moment where, i think it's kim hunter who plays zero i think it was and it never happened. i've this absolute solidmemory of seeing it and then one day later on i saw cabaret, you know, andthere's a moment when liza minnelli turns to yer man he says but i want tolove you now and i realize that what happened was i had seen a trailer forcabaret and a trailer the battle for the planet of the apes next to each otherand i'd transposed the bit of her doing it to planet of the apes. to this day i can see the scene with the apes. to cut a long story short i went back to see

krakatoa east of java again on dvd bythis point and i was watching it i didn't remember it, there were scenes of it that i had no memory of at all and then suddenly there is indeed a weird musical sequence in whichsuddenly out of nowhere this woman sings this song about i'm an old-fashioned girl and i want not notnot that old it's basically a version of that song was her partner issort of lying drunken on a bed and it's a musical sequence and i did notremember krakatoa east of java having a musical sequence in except that the only thing iremember about it was this woman singing the strange song to this bloke so it didhappen. i don't know if that answered your question so i that's how i remember krakatoa east of java that was my first cinema experience.

it definitely answered another question which i didn't ask, that doesn't matter. it also explains whyyou say your favorite film is the exorcist when of course it's probablybambi then by that kind of logic exactly but the exorcist has been my favorite film sincelong before i saw it because it because it because when the exorcist came out came out '63, err '73in america '74 here so i was born in '63 so i was 10/11 when it was coming out here. many of you probably aren't old enough to remember butwhen it came it was a really big deal i mean it was absolutely it was a newstory you know stories about people fainting, people passing out, people beingcarried out of cinemas. i used to go to the cinema in hendon called the classic inhendon and i remember going to it was a three-screener which was what then passed for amultiplex and i was going to see

something else and it was probably atowering inferno or something and the exorcist was showing on one screen andnuns were standing outside the cinema sprinkling holy water on people going in and i mean the fact of the matter is if you weren't terrified before you got there by the time you got into the cinema, and then therewas st john's ambulance brigade outside i'm not making this up this is true people were literally passingout being carried out the cinema and i remember thinking this must be thegreatest film in the world actually you know it's having thisreaction because i was too far too young to see them back then they used to be

they did used to be stricter aboutcertain x films i mean there's certain things i care about but the exorcist wasone of those films if he didn't look 18 they probably weren't gonna let you in tosee it was such a lot of fuss about it so for 5 years before i saw it, i read the book i read the making of the thing i read magazine articles about it by the time i finallysaw the film i seen the film in my head and then i saw it and it was better itwas even better than i'd imagined it to be but i've never been so scared in mylife as i was the first time i saw this is absolutely brilliant, it is sublimelyterrifying. ian rankin, who was here a few weeks ago said that basically he wanted to do a phd at edinburgh university because he thought it would be a

really good idea of the government wouldpay him to write his first novel very good, very good i'm summarising, but that's roughly what he said did you want to do phd so you couldspend a lot of time watching film? i mean yes the short version is that is what happened ii was at manchester university which i loved and i was never very goodacademically i didn't get good o-levels i didn't get good a-levels i got rejected from manchesteruniversity three times i think, and i took a year out and i finally got into manchester through clearing, so i arrived in manchester with a massive chip on my shoulder which is a very good thing and then as a as aas an undergraduate i was you know

solid low 2:1, 2:2 you know i was in thatkind of area but what i was was i was annoyingly determined and backthen if you want to do phd with the british academy [asking audience: linda i do mean the british academy don't i? yeah fine] sorry, my wife is a professoractually holds half of my memory. and the british academy would fundyou to do things and as far as i understand it was at the point that theyhad suddenly started to demand that if they put money into somebody doingpostgraduate thing that they would they wanted the thing at the end of it elser: that's shocking i know, but because a lot of people were

starting starting phds and notfinishing in that doesn't happen now incidentally but it did used to happen and asfar as i understand the university said to the ba well he's not the sharpestknife in the drawer but he will finish and they were right and i did and whathappened was that in those three years that i was in manchester i started withfor city life magazine which is workers' co-op which was brilliant so everybodygot to do everything we had the corner house cinema which was you know showing all thediverse art house fare where we had the arben cinema in hulme we had two what-then-passed-formultiplexes; the screen 1-5 and the screen 6-9 and so it was it was brilliant you hadenough to live on and you were being and

i was writing my thesis on horrorfiction which is what i loved anyway so in that period and it was so it was sucha privilege with education is such to have been given the oportunity to do thatwas such a such a privilege and it was great and iyou know what i grabbed it with both hands and being in manchester in that period when city life was happening was it was it could not have been better we've got quite a lot of questions that peoplewill thank you for it have tweeted or sent us byemail and so on but just before we get to those, at the point at which it becamea job, when you go to, you know, cannes

kermode: i don't go to cannes esler: you don't go to cannes? kermode: not any more. my motto is cannes don't esler: alright, well when you goto i'm not sure where a film festival where there are a lot of films some ofwhich you haven't seen because they're new films and you may have to see three or four a daydo you do that? and do you not get jaded by the end of the day? well, actually that's a veryinteresting question and it raises two different things are generallythe circuit i'm on now is what's called the national press critic circuits on aweekly so i'm a weekly critic so every week i do

radio 5, i do you and i do bbc news 24, bbc news whatever-it's-called esler: i think i've called krakatoa east of java and then i write the weekly film reveiws for the observer so i tend to see films in the week they come out the way it works isyou have screenings on monday and tuesday and on monday and tuesday you'llsee three or four films back-to-back each day 10.30, 2, 4 and 6, 10.30, 2 , 4 and 6, and thenactually nowadays because the way that the release schedules work there may beup to 13/14 films released in any week

and so are the other ones you try andcatch them on you know screeners or they'll send you a link to watch it online so generally youwatch ten films a week and you generally watch those ten films in the space oftwo days now actually that's because it's like anything else it's like a jobyou get you know you get into the rhythm of it and it's not necessary it's notthe case that don't they all blend into one because no they don't because youknow if anyone's doing the job like they were in a law firm in one case doesn'tbleed into the other, it's very easy, you know you're a news presenter one news story doesn't bleedinto the other, but i'm sure that people say to you don't they all just kind of become, but they don't. festivals aredifferent thing and one of the reasons

why i just lost the plot with cannes and ireally did lose the plot with cannes, quite spectacularly ended up getting thrown out screening of ... i've told this story before but it'strue i was at the screening of lars von trier's the idiots and the problem with cannes is it's an absolutebunfight you know you have to get even gettinginto the screenings is nerve-wracking and then people of people that by thethird day people are tired people have you know they're they're rattled therewatching things out of context they don't know what's going on everyone'saggressive you know and my

feeling is that under thosecircumstances your judgment is shot, there are people who can make good judgment callsin those circumstances but i'm not one of them and i was in i was in a pointwhere i'd gone there for radio 1 and and it was on a blue pass which meant you was up slightly down from you know you were like the very bottom of the potanyway short version of the story is it was the screening of lars von trier's the idiots and i didn'tlike it at all, and there was this, i could feel this critical stuff going on and then suddenly there is the sequence in the idiots for no reason at all that i could tell which is suddenly hardcore pornwhich you know and what happened was there was a ripple went round the crowd"oh bravo well done, marvellous"

and i just thought i can't stand this and i stood up and shoutedin very bad, i failed my french o-level twice got it time round and i went "il est merde, il est le plus grand merde dans le monde entire" and after that i didn't go to cannes any more right well that question that we have got so manyquestions from the audience as well lie but just pick up on that thoughtthere's a number of questions about the oscars could sum up by saying yourspeakers are they rubbish or not yes the thing is that for me that's that that'snot that's nothing new about saying that i did i started this culture show whichwas on the long time and we started this

we start doing this thing about tenyears ago it was a joke cuz i always used to say the problem with theauspices of the oscars are not representative of anything at all theyjust if you look at the history of the oscars and you imagine that somehow whatthe oscars do we celebrate the best in cinema then you'd probably give upwatching movies i mean you know we just spoke about this before we came on youknow what won the oscar for best picture the citizen kane didn't anyone know howgreen was my valley perfectly fine film is it citizen kind not okay what won theoscar the year that the exorcist didn't win this thing was it the best film ofthe year

absolutely not what won the oscar forbest picture the year that saving private ryan didn't win shakespearianlove i mean you know and what won the oscar win the oscar the year thatdriving miss daisy did everything everything so this really weird idea about theoscars being you know we have a problem with it with a british film industrythat if a british film does well at the oscars it's like the british are comingand then the nation's when there are always a bridge for ministries in crisisyou cannot judge the success of your own cinema or indeed worldwide cinema by theoscar now obviously right now really

really big issue about diversitycorrectly the lack of diversity and it's not just to do with race it's to do withwhat for example you look at the best director category what a surprise thatwill mail you know the fact of the matter is it took the academyeighty-something years to give their best director prize 2004 i mean howlikely is it that for the first eighteen years every single best film of the yearwas directed by men statistically how likely is that to be true or not at allno animated film has ever won the oscar for best picture no film in any languageother than other primarily than english has ever won its like the issue ofdiversity goes so far through the oscars

and its i think it's very good peopleare raising it now because there's no question there's no question that it's aproblem but just before the oscar nominations were announced the observerdid a thing which they asked some of their critics me got a large catherineshow on to say who they thought you know should win the oscar who they thoughtyou know what films should be recognized for me was the best director should meansomething seemed off a girlhood which incidentally i know was eligible for theoscars i checked it was one of the three hundred and five title the opened inamerica and was put down as an eligible title and i guarantee that not one ofthe oscar voters had seen it

best actress keira deuterated was afantastic as the lead-in girlhood supporting actor idris elba for donationwe were all choosing these things so believe me when the oscars was announcedwe just all india well so it's business as usual so it is a problem but i thinkthe problem is the problem is absolutely endemic in the academy's way of lookingat movies is so narrow i mean most as a film critic you you're very lucky youget to see a really wide range of movies but when you look at what the oscars theacademy vote for you can't imagine that they've actually seen that way to awider range of movies in fact i would suspect that what happens is they lookat what gets nominated at the golden

globes and then they they you know theygot to the golden girls become the unofficial first round of the oscars butthe lack of the lack of diversity is also in the people who are making thejudgment with the people that they're judging i know absolutely and if youwant to know what a bunch of mainly white mainly over 65 mainly men think ofthe best movies of the year then go ahead just don't think that it makes anydifference to to to what actually the best movie i mean who directed so greatfilm african-american woman so she is in two categories which are significantlyunder-represented at seven percent of directors women something like that andthen britain it's better in britain cite

cite better and i said to her once in aninterview how many african-american women directors on the working inhollywood and she said we could have all get all have lunch together in 2003three or four ya how do you equate that with we've had before which is like agreat parts for women and yet this year there are some films which are nominatedvarious categories where they're fantastic and i think that's thatrequire yeah but that british really really small had no chance of gettingnoticed at the oscars the problem is therefore to fold the problem is onehand industries point the industry needs to diversify but eventhen the second tier of that is what the

academy tends to look at is notrepresentative in the industry it's a very very small portion of it the veryfact that there is a phrase and oscar movie critics user it's an awesome moviewhat does it mean that that even exists as a phrase that there is such a thingas an oscar movie it means that this is what i mean another example leonardodicaprio is going to win the oscar for best actor this year ok don't incidentally just as you knowbetting bad even if you do not my fault leonardo dicaprio is going to win theoscar this year the bears gonna win the oscar you do know the best not realdon't you i keep telling you the best

feature but you tell me why is he goingthat's why you see going to win well there's two reasons firstly it'shis turn ok it's absolutely his turn right you didn't get nominated fortitanic been nominated five times before and everyone get teased turn secondlyit's the oscar-winning performance he grew a beard and got really cold i mean for me i mean i think she's really good i thinkthat's what an oscar winning performance looks like that's there is a certaintype of performance that wins oscar's oscar voters like you to have sufferedand they like it they like to speak to

the can't quite understand what yousayin takes time and they particularly like the story that he genuinely had toeat a bisons liver and that was what i love about that story is the way thatthey've sort of played as well we don't want to talk about this but did you knowthat that's the thing that's going oscar voters 82 bisons liver his turn rightlet's change the subject has got a question here actually this is from theuniversity of kent arts center asking about films family films for films forthe 2016 point festival for films or without family films or family well obviously mary poppins because evenget a loan

one of the 10 greatest movies ever madeand if you don't think that's true those are the doors i mean it's it's just oneof those that there are very few films i think you know actually did you know youdivide people these can be my friends in these can't be my friends but you'reeither in the mary poppins careful you're not in the mary poppins it's it'sbrilliant it's timeless it's you know the songs are wonderful the story'sfantastic julie andrews is absolutely perfect practically perfect in every way yes he's great and don't stop at theexact same because you know it's there are british actors who do worse cockneyaccent and you know and they go off into

the dream into the pavement trying tofigure out whether joins our it's just on a technical level it is absolutelybrilliant it is just wonderful never fails i loved it when i was a kidi loved it now 52 there was a year of my life when my daughter was young and itwas one of the very first feature film she watched and i put it on to theexclusive she probably want to watch it and you know and then we must havewatched it three or four times a week for a year and by the end of it irealized that it was so that definitely do that which is just really love sceneis the best feature film and it's really strange it's genuinely its worksfabulously and i had as a kid i had an

mfp album of the soundtrack you knoweric thompson doing the whole doing the whole thing and all of this fellafielding offers the blue voice and i played this is the age before video isaw the film and i loved it i just listened to the soundtrack album overand over and over again i swear learn all the dialogue i can now recite the entire film fromthe beginning and then i'd say whatever the princess could go either becauseactually we talked about their reasoning which is just so wonderful and it's imean it's this brilliant demonstration in an age in which animation is so muchto do with you know 3d and cg and

everything that you can have hand-drawnanimation we'll take a timeless tale like that and make it work for such awide audience and it's so beautiful it's so sumptuous and you can just get lostin the animation i think anybody could see in love that film and then i'll gofor inside out which i thought was the film that actually should have won theoscar for best picture this year but didn't even get nominated best picturebecause the academy don't give the best picture award to animated features theyjust don't and yet you know i've seen that three or four times it every timei've seen it i've been completely knocked out by it and i think it worksfor young and old alike and i think it's

a really profound movie and i think in50 years time it'll be a pub trivia question what won the award for bestfeature the year that inside out that's interesting because one of thequestions came in as what film have you watched in the last five years that youthink will be held up as a classic in 20 years time reducing inside-out well igenuinely think it will and i think people are very people don't like to sayyou know an animated movie is their favorite film of the year because theythink it's it seems to feel like i don't list and it's because animation is soobviously one of if not the most exciting areas of cinema and you know interms of invention in terms of diversity

in terms of you know you living in aworld in which we got stop frame animation we've got cg animation we'vegot hand-drawn animation there's so many different types of animation and and yetpeople still have this kind of strange snobbish attitude towards it and yet wehave no problem of course the only disney classics you know of course theyare well that's what that's what pics are doing now that's what you have beendoing that's what you know the rocky films like those are all absolutely cultclassics so i think inside out will be the one that you know five ten yearstime people will will really still hold up as it as it to return to your socksminions is a great what i love me is a

great for me and one of the things abouttwitter before you know it the best things about the internet is everyonehas access to it but the internet is everyone has access to it and peoplewould send me these measures i can't believe you said that the movie was goodyou should be fired i love to i loved it genuinely funnygenuine improper slapstick and i love slapstick love slapstick comedy yellowand so much what do anything to do with solid comedy and silent film and i dofind that stuff i find physical comedy funny questions we got plenty that wecould talk about that he would like to have a go we've got a microphone andthen there's one up at the back as well

gentlemen there is interesting that ananti-establishment attitudes towards film innocence you know with the antiqueand the what you think maybe the old rumor shinee celebrity culture affectsthe finer qualities of filmmaking sale feeling about attitudes what the fact ofthe matter ease in terms of hollywood cinema celebrity culture has always beena part of it we are very given to thinking that it's a new thing but it'sall it is is that the way in which the control of it is done is change whatused to be the un actors and actresses would sign up for you know contract withstudios and the studios would then micromanage their image the way thestudios work with the newspaper outlets

was very very kind of you knowintertwined now there's there's at least the illusion of something other thanthat but it is still the same function which is that you have a personalitythat you're selling publicly and that's always been the fact is that there havebeen you know decades of absolutely brilliant hollywood films my butt so ithink i think i don't think the celebrity culture is any better or anyworse now than it has ever been what i think however is that the best thingabout being a film critic for me is you get to see pretty much everything thatgets release and the first thing he realizes we start doing the job you knowsort of a working week left

is that the the sense that everythingout there he's blockbuster superhero celebrity led movies simply isn't truewhat it is is that those are the things that make the noise so in any week if isee ten films yet they'll be you know there will be those movies but they'llalso be filmed from japan i never heard of a strange latvian animation that iknew nothing about those are the things that actually the real treat and andbarry norman want said this thing i think he's absolutely right i think he'sa real property and he wants said that in any given year the number of good andbad movies is probably the same the only differences the amount of attentionthose movies get paid what i discovered

over the use of doing the national filmthing for a while now is that it's really just a matter of laundry shiftyour focus it's not that that cinema is now overrun by celebrity hollywoodblockbusters like there are a lot of them it's that there's everything elsedustin hoffman said last year he said cinema is the worst it's ever been inthe fifty years that i've been working on what i'm quoting him obviously icould do his voice but i can't said in the fifties i'll be working sowhat's the worst it's ever been and i thought that's just such a non serbs itmay be that the fifty years you've been working in a very rarefied area it's notgreat but you're saying that in the

carolinas girlhood came out as thefalling asleep girlhood and you know this and it all these wonderful maybe myten best films of the year down from a list of 30 so it's it's just the stuffis out there is just the attention is paid to the celebrity stuff and it'svery easy to avoid that you just avoided me know you'd like to say i'm pleasedyou enjoyed your stay manchester's miles it was it was it was it was wonderful iwas really lucky to you know i really look back i should say that mark alsopropagandize but those kind of films that we don't see if he came up to meand said this is the best south korean film you'll see this week

quality woes and actually we do try tothe film review slot that gavin i do we do try and because if you if you've gotseven minutes to talk about films and you can make one of those filmssomething that will make a tangible difference and it's not because of whati say about it it's because it's a couple of minutes of television in whichpeople are just a way that is a film that's that's the one of the nicestthings about doing that slot was somebody came up to you he would madeone of those films and said that actually aid that they thought that youknow you have brought a few people in as a result of it being a bit that's greatthat's absolutely great so if there is

any you know there is any purpose towhat we did it should be that it should be there if you doing the film reviewshow it shouldn't just concentrate leader we ought we have the right tochoose what we do we shouldn't just use the three big big hollywood blockbusterswhat you should do is try and obviously like my voice is quite loud i just wantto change direction a little bit with the question and i wondered what youthink the how you think the role of being a critic has changed in kind of anonline world of blogs and how you think people could potentially get noticed iguess in ava saturated market it's a really good question i wrote a bookabout this anyway i'd like to say thank

you very much for me being able tooperate very interesting when i started writing hatchet job i had this kind ofbecause i come from old-school journalism you know from from city lifemagazine when it was we would physically put the magazine together like we wereliterally physically you know you have boards up and stuff and you put it intoa typesetter come out and stick it with spray glue onto a page then set off tobe photographed turn into a magazine i remember very clearly it was good and heloved it he used to edit with a scalpel he wants that this thing is that thisreviews too long i said how long to about three inches and as a result ofthat you were in an environment in which

he was surrounded by other journalistsand you get my case much better journalist oh and espinosa lynyrd you know people who are reallyreally really sort of cutting-edge groceries journalists all of whom wenton to a very very good korea's then i went to time out which i was my editorswith geoff andrew and brian case and i remember writing review and then seeingthem go through it and do this with it and it was it was very much like what acheater would do if you doing a thesis or something but you know that doesn'twork this you know you have to sign post this doesn't make any sense

brian case did this thing once i wrote afeature and you could literally came up in front of me and tour in half and whenthey do it on that and it was so i learned from that now when it comes toblogging you get you can go from you know from nowhere to published like thatone level that's great because it means you know you you haven't had to gothrough all these other areas but there is a problem with that first easyediting and i'm not saying you like editing and maybe maybe you're brilliantwriter already but i tell you from where i'm standing editors of the best thingthat ever happened to me everything i ever written

has been any good at all is good if itis good because of an editor you know when i was writing my my mythesis my phd linda my wife is literally went through it like this and and i youknow going that doesn't make sense this doesn't work when i went to timeoutthats what happened and over the years you start to learn now with blogging theproblem is that you don't have that and i and i think it's something that mostpeople could benefit from that said if you can get a blog out there it's greatbecause it's good to get attention but the problem is everybody else get theirblog out there is well so how do you make your voice heard about everybodyelse's and i honestly think having

written job at the end of a job i completelychanged my position i think the answer is that the conditions are still thesame the people who are writing blogs on the internet who are getting attentionare doing exactly the same work that the old school classic film journalist forthe french you know pete approach of those people doing they write well theydescribed the film accurately they spill people's names right they are they areable to put the filming context in a way that is readable and then they had theiropinion to it and they are only about their opinion and if you look at bikesto use an online journalist somebody

winos kept came to me and i was askingfor advice about writing started writing a blog but is now pay journalist yougotta the thing that defines exactly the same as what defined good film criticismin print the rules are still the same you have to say yes to describe the filmaccurately you have to contextualize it and then you have to add your opinion ina way which says this is just my opinion i mean you know but you have to behonest about your opinion i think in the end it doesn't plus everyone is ablogging now i wrote a column for the observer the minute the observers'printed its online so everyone is writing online anyway i do genuinelythink that that it's there are as many

good online journalist at theiroperating journalists but the ones that are doing well the ones that would havedone well in print anyway the other day on 5 live during your review the heightflight he said that what quentin tarantino might need collaborated ofreally back in from writing loads of stuff that doesn't need to be in thefilm was wondering who might be a good collaborate to today that you know thatis a brilliant questioned my my feeling about tarantino has always been thatwhat he needs is to be in a room with a producer standing over him with a verybig stick going ninety minutes 90 minutes and when youhit but he said he makes money and be

scared yet but it's not just it's notjust that he makes money it's that harvey weinstein described miramax asthe house that quentin field and then he described the wine travel organisationas the house that quentin rebuilt and because you know tarantino's movies havemade they have done well for 404 441 seniors are very very important producerand consequently tarantino has earned the right to not have anyone standingover with a big stick my feeling has always been that people do their bestwork when they're having to you know that having to fight an old rule whichis the first thing you do with the film is that if you have never made a film inmy life nor could i so just to be clear

about this i'm not telling other peoplei couldn't do it but you read this so many comics you make a film the firstthing you do is get your favorite scene and take it out and see whether the filmworks with it the film world without it and then go through the whole film andtake every single scene and don't put it back unless the film doesn't workwithout it you know you love is cut everything down less is more and igenuinely believe that tarantino's best work reservoir dogs which has made it veryvery little money very tight circumstances and then jackie brown orjackie brown is actually a long movie

jackie brown is the best part 3 at wasbut it needs to be it's the right length doesn't hate flight need to be the bestpart is a 90 minute movie i mean it is demonstrable in ninety minute movie 35minutes into the film before they arrived many haberdashery right that'sthe beginning of the movie that they arrived at many haberdashery but it'syou know for me i think that the thing that frustrates me about tarantino i think he is talented i think he issmall i think his knowledge of cinema is vast and i think he could and can dogreat work he just doesn't and the reason he doesn't it cuz he's surroundedby people telling him he's broke

ians and what he needs to be in asituation of his being surrounded by somebody is not telling him he'sbrilliant but you know what is really listen to me is doing very well and he'screating and you know what you see you seen a flight right yet do you think istoo long how long how much to them so basically half the film right just thebeginning there's a really good ninety five minute movie that led down here hi i get asked to give you this isabsolutely true it is not not making this up i genuinely don't know becausewhat i genuinely try to do is to not know what's coming up i have had a sortof pork loin moment some years ago when

i thought that actually the what youknow what a film critics should should be doing is knowing what's in thepipeline and being a festival to see everything first you know and then i canbuy surely the thing you should do is watch the films as and when they come upand why is the first review of anything there is weird thing with withnewspapers first review first look you know the film finished playing in a starwas 3.5 minutes ago in hisar review first patrol most of the time you knowi'd rather be lost but considered rather than first but wrong so i genuinely havetried to stop doing now they're all times anyway what's coming up in thenext two or three months and i mean i

know for example the dead zombie moviescoming out as a no toby jones i know that's happening and i know that there'sa new captain america movie coming out there has been trying for everyone butbeyond knowing that they're coming out i genuine and i tell you the thing i'mmost looking forward to is the thing that the third screening on a tuesdayafter i've seen to superhero movies and something else which is a film i'venever heard of which i know think about when i go in and seed andwhich will end up being movie of the week because you know that one of thebest cinema going experiences i ever had ever ever ever was seeing audition youknow the ticket akashi film agreed i saw

in edinburgh with trevor johnson who isincidentally one of the best film journalist writing in this country iread that man's writing and i wanna week because i will never be that good andhe's he's wife is japanese and he was learning japanese right so he said wegotta go see this movie film for what you know about it so i know its japanesethat's right so we going to be sitting on it starts out as a romantic comedy get a date and so we set up an auditionas if he's producing a film to audition people to come along meet him and then25 minutes it turns into the horror film you have ever trevor and i was hidingbehind the second white-knuckle

had no idea what this film was going onit was brilliant when i reviewed it wanted to say i don't say anything butthis will just go see it you know because it was absolutely fabulous tosee having know nothing about it what would you change in the film industrywell i think the answer questions film critics don't have the power and i thinkit's a really good thing that they don't want to be really clear about this the reason on the film critic is notbecause i'm a failed filmmaker ok i couldn't make a film i have no desire tomake films i like to watch that's what i do i'm like peter sellers and i thinkthe worst thing is film criticism which

attempts to which attempts to tellpeople how the film however they should have made a film i mean we've allwritten those reviews on his guilty of israeli i'm probably undoing a pop-upsaying you know tarintino need somebody standing over him with it with a bigstick it does not mean you know what they're doing that for the film critics job is not tochange the film industry the film critics job is to react respond honestlyto what there is they're the worst film makers should not make films for criticsthey shouldn't pay any attention to critics they probably shouldn't readreviews i think film critics should not

ideal world should not be friends withfilmmakers because the two disciplines a completely different and and i'll giveyou an example of that i was very good friends with ken russell it was aneighbor of ours and we were very close and as a result of it i could never lookat any of ken's films i loved his work for i met him once i met him i can neverlook at any time without knowing how much a lot can you know even when hemade some frankly unwatchable sure you know you were still looking i mean ifyou've ever seen the kitten for hitler that's a film that's hard to love buti'd so so my aunts would be my critics don't have any influence on you know onhow films get made the only only

influence i think they should have ispossibly flagging up the existence of a diversity of cinema audiences audiencesmake their own decision about what maybe they'd like to see what critics do ifthey happen to tell you that this film is out all that film is a good way beingshocked after that all we're doing is just doing what we're doing now isdiscussing film that's it you can't it's not the critics job to make films betterand can we make it worse 892 i would just be sure what about thati wouldn't have noted that sounds good let's start this again this universityand ensure you go into a film review prepared prepared and then you run awaywith yourself and you don't fit

everything in order your phone if youdoing it and you find it very easy to get out exactly what you wanted to sayokay that's a really good question was the way the way it works is with broadcustomer reviews right yes the way it works for me is this i see films onmonday and tuesday are rightly observe a column on wednesday when i spentthursday better and you know how would have written by the time i get to fridaywhen i'm doing the show with gavin the show with simon i have thought throughwhat i think about the films but what i then trying to is there is certain tothe key things that i think are important in the sort of condensedversion of what i have spent some time

thinking about it from releasing andthen i and then i just talked about them so actually so for example the wholeentourage thing you know which ended up being as long as it was that wasn'tplanned that absolutely was not planned it's just that was i just got back rossabout it or when i was talking about room for example just the other week imean i had read a review of room and i found myselfhalf-way through the reviewing on the right now i said im gonna burst intotears i am i am not being funny but i genuinely thought i'm gonna stop cryingand that's really not not gonna help but you can hear that that's not hope youcan hear that it's not put on a stock so

what i do is i the preparation is thatwriting the preparation is that writing the review and then i'm talking fromthat if when i was doing before when i wasn't doing a weekly film column what iwould do is i would write a review even if it wasn't to be published right inadvance like if we do exams you know you tend to write stuff them because it getsinto your head to remember and then you talk about it so it is a mixture of youknow but it's not scripted it's absolutely not scripted program you cantell it's not scripted when gavin annoy the the film review i have a sheet ofpaper which has got the names in front of it because there's always leaving thetheory that thing about suddenly going

directed by and then you blank ok nowactually what happens if you have a piece of paper that says lennyabrahamson brie larson jacob trembley you don't need to look at it because youknow it's there but if you sat there without a piece of paper you wouldsuddenly get that thing about going blank and the other thing is this yousee this all the time what are you doing or not doing anything i'm just becauseit's like this makes me think i'm thinking logically absolutely nothing a few minutes left myjust know you're not ready to exactly what you need to produce a couple ofother questions that one is the

experience of watching a film and itlooks into something you said earlier when you see it on the big screen or yousometimes get whatever do you find that your judgment changes revenant i thinkis touched on recently about that that is the perfect example so i saw revenueon a battle screen as well and i have to say the first time i sorry i was notwell boy i thought it was ok but you know that story to some extent becausethe wilderness survival narrative and i thought it was solid but not much morethan solely and i talked to nigel floyd who had seen in a cinema and actuallyknowledge of the night although we disagree about a lot of things we dosome respect each other's opinion and he

said gibson film which is unbelievablyvisceral me whatever you think about mel gibson's apocalypto is a really reallyfilm and i just need to see on the big screen you really do and i said wellyou're busy but ok fine then i went to fox and it was a completely differentexperience i mean it was absolutely ok find this makes sense to me now becauseall that emanuel the best camera world actually only works when it's that allaround you watching it on the on the small screen it looks i have to sayrather trixie looked if anything so doing that in one shot and then he's onthe whole thing is when you saw in the city was a visual experience anotherfilm that i would say that was true for

his gravity gravity doesn't work some extent on a small screen but it'snot the failed you're not getting there that experience of you know floating inspace with sandra bullock and you know that there are there are some film whenit absolutely makes a difference but i think the revenant is really a case inwhich you have to see on a properly big-screen to understand what it is thatit's doing and one other thing which i kind of alluded to start just when iread your columns or when we talk about films while you dislike some filmsintensely it seems to me i don't you have this in the back of your mind whilelikely to start these you tend to tell

me the things i should get off mybackside and go out and see where is rather than you can be other critics canbe quite snide about films and tell me what i shouldn't want to see or don'twant to see i mean do you think that's part of your job to say this is the bestsouth korean film you see all week you know this is something that's worth theeffort yeah i think two things both first ithink is very kind of you to say so because i am very conscious of the factthat you know i have a reputation for you know for going off about films idon't like and really odd thing is that you can you know you can slide off afilm like sex in the city two and

everyone remembers and then you can viewyou can go on for you know exactly the same amount of time about why issomething like dots of reality is you know and nobody notices and it's areally weird thing that people remember the bad reviews and not the good onesone of the reasons i think that the bad movies are funny and i think that wouldbe seriously i think that's actually that's the case i mean you know i walkdown the street i could not be talking about dance reality and it's fantasticand i'll be going on a walk the streets so that sex in the city the other day iwhenever it's on television people tweet me you know what she channel 56

every now and then you start to thinkthat's it that's the only thing but what you actually want and i also think it'sjust you know getting older is that when you start doing it you do realize thatthere is a certain pleasure and also which can be cheap pleasure in reallykicking the life out something that's why you know that one-star reviews tendto get attention they do because people like to read a real savage kicking butactually if your job is to have any purpose at all it ought to be to flag upthe stuff which is interesting and in the end what it comes down to is it'sit's a simple matter of space so for example like in the observatory on theassassin the film which i really loved

and you know and i'll let on secondcoming the green film and led on the folding and i dont girlhood if if ifthere's any positive purpose of doing it that those reviews of that big and theother reviews of this big and so therefore people will like you peoplejust really do think that that is something that as a critic you'd want tobe known for i am also very aware that unless known for that i am liking thingsoff but then again guilty of it because you know i've written several books andyou know some of them had lovely reviews commentary of them i can remember everyword that bad for you debates and and so it's you know i know from the other sidethat's that's how it works but if if

you're not just saying that to be nice ithink you probably not if he's no no no no i mean is i mean i genuinelyappreciate what happens is that you do does flag something up for you as beinginteresting then that's the thing i'm most proud of because that's really thething if there is any good in what you're doing that will be it it would beyou know it comes back this argument before about and back to the oscars backto everything we've been talking about it's everything is out there is just todo with way you man is to showing you notice on a particularlight when pete branch leads in the guardian on a smaller release foreignlanguage film it probably has a tangible

effect on that film's uk box office you know he's probably the mostinfluential critic in terms of flagging up a foreign language release thatpeople might not heard of that that whatever else he does he's very famousfor writing very vitriolic one-story views because he's a brilliant writerwrites really well but it's the leading on the slightly more esoteric stuff thatis actually the meat of what he's doing and you ask any film critic with thistrend was always the same you know i i mean it's it's difficult to go fromphilip french the observer and i learned a really important lesson

nothing at all if you gonna take over ajob from somebody take over from somebody was rubbish don't take overfrom somebody who is genuinely the best somebody who when they stood down theobserved around six pages of tributes from every single major filmmakercurrently working in the industry including one from moscow slaves youthat use the word irreplaceable on on that happy note i think pleasedthat you do transform our experience in the works gonna sign some books outside i like tothank you for a great thank you very much