Curmudgeonly Critic: Mark Kermode @ The Edinburgh Book Festival 2011

Mark Kermode likes to talk. A lot. At length. The good doctor’s answer to the first question posed by Hannah McGill, tonight’s host, takes up about 20% of his allotted time. And his answers are great — funny (his story about a badly projected Zac Efron), grumpy (his incredulity at Michael Bay’s continued box-office success) and slightly bashful (he’s a mere amateur compared to his mentors Nigel Floyd and Kim Newman). They’re also a tiny bit robotic. Amid the bonhomie of the RBS tent at Charlotte Square, Kermode feels closer to a stand-up comic than a film critic, wowing the crowd with a well worked routines about Avatar (Smurfahontas, Dances With Smurfs) and, his favourite topic of late, the inevitable demise of 3D: anecdotes and rants that will be extremely familiar to anyone who listens to his excellent 5Live radio programme (“the BBC’s flagship film review show”, he cheekily reminds the audience — take that Winkleman).

The crowd don’t seem to mind but I feel slightly short changed. Billed on the Book Festival's website as “two movie experts and a new book on film”, I’d hoped for some ferocious debate between Kermode and McGill (a sharp film critic with an even sharper tongue) on some of the themes covered in his angry and entertaining new book, The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex. Despite the juicy subject matter and McGill’s valiant attempts to get a word in edgeways, Kermode never really goes beyond the surface of such topics as Why do bad movies still become blockbusters? Why isn’t there the same reverence for cinema as there is for other art forms? and What is the role of the film critic in all this?

Kermode’s curmudgeonly persona is great company, though, and his diatribes against movies featuring pirates and robots and the Na'vi are as welcome and reassuring as reruns of Steptoe and Son. In fact, the event is, ironically, like a good night at the multiplex watching a summer blockbuster, thrilling while it lasts but it doesn’t leave you with much to think about on the bus ride home.