#54 It’s Only a Movie, by Mark Kermode (Random House)

It’s always slightly dangerous reading a book by someone you respect and admire. OK, I’ll say it. I bloody love the ever-opinionated Mark Kermode and the film review programme he does with Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 5 live. Immediately, therefore, my expectations are sky high and, unfortunately, It’s Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive doesn’t live up to them.

It’s not a bad book, by any stretch of the imagination. While not quite an autobiography (although it does chart his career in the film business), there are plenty of good tales and anecdotes, coupled with a deeper forensic analysis of movie-making.

He may be famed for his rants against stodge of the likes of Marley and Me, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Michael Bay (I could go on…), but there is much more to Kermode, and some of the book reads like a thoughtful essay on various subjects.

Given his favourite film of all time is The Exorcist – as he mentions at least twice on every show – it’s no surprise that perhaps the best of these dissertations relates how watching that particular film was an other-worldly and ‘genuinely transcendent’ experience for him, and it’s more intelligent fare than some might expect from a ‘film book’.

To his credit, he heaps praise for the radio show’s success on Mayo, and quite rightly, because while the knowledgeable Kermode is the mouthy critic, it’s the broadcaster who quite brilliantly steers the bickering ‘wittertainment’ away from the rocks of self-indulgence and into the minds of the Sony Awards judges.

But back to the book, and my main problem, which is the writing style Kermode deploys: because it’s really very annoying. The concept is fine enough, we’re in his head and he’s imagining someone is making a film of his life, so we’ve got Charles Hawtrey playing Mayo, Julianne Moore playing his wife and the much-loved Jason Isaacs (hello Jason Isaacs), portraying Kermode. Absolutely dandy.

But why oh why did Kermode, or the publisher, or the editor, or whoever, allow the entire book to contain a word in italics - every other line or so - to demonstrate extra emphasis. A quick excerpt is called for:

“…true learning (it seems to me) is all about understanding and appreciating just how much you will never know. For example, at the age of forty-six, I am just starting to realise how vast and unbridgeable are the gaps in my knowledge of the history of cinema, a medium which has only been around for just over a century. Even if I dedicated every waking moment of the next twenty years to studying the art of silent cinema, the growth of Indian cinema, and the bewildering marketing expanse of the ‘Pacific Rim’, I’d still only be scratching the surface.”

Do you see what I mean? I’ll forgive Kermode a lot, but it just seems like bad writing if, by the way you use words and construct sentences, you can’t imply such an emphasis without the use of a different typeface.

So, rating time:

#54 It’s Only a Movie, by Mark Kermode (Random House) - 6/10

Next up: The Ruby in her Naval, by Barry Unsworth (Penguin Group)

Click here for the full list of books so far, and their rating