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Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema is a new five-part BBC4 series about the movie critic’s first love, which starts with romantic comedies, and it doesn’t take long before Mr Kermode breaks films down a bit more than the rest of us would, for example, in terms of showing how Splash perfectly fits the three-act structure that most films follow, and I can see that in a lot of modern blockbuster films, today.
This first programme covers romantic comedies, aka “rom-coms”, with various chapters to each episode, such as “The Meet-Cute” – when the two characters meet and find each other attractive, The Casting – getting the right actors for your rom-com, as well as The Music and Dance – i.e. mixing the two together, since there’ll always be song-and-dance number in this genre of film, and he gives a good example with Joseph Gordon Levitt dancing to Hall & Oates’ You Make My Dreams Come True in the brilliant (500) Days Of Summer.
One suggestion I’d give for my favourite equivalent is in the opening credits of the otherwise-mediocre Get Over It, when Ben Foster is dumped by his girlfriend, and as he carries his belongings, walking towards the camera, he’s soon followed by a band, led by Vitamin C, singing Captain and Tenille’s Love Will Keep Us Together.
Go on, then, another favourite, from the end of The Voices, starring Ryan Reynolds, when he and others all sing a cover of The O Jays’ Sing A Happy Song. Both of these are below, but ignore the fact that the uploaders haven’t labelled them correctly.
Going back to the chapters, I mentioned, they would be great points for an eventual DVD or Blu-ray release, but I suspect that the amount of movie rights negotiation involved would make that prohibitive.
There’s a great deal to get your teeth into with this from the man who once declared “What film critics say DOESN’T MATTER!” which came on his vlog of the Top 10 Worst Movies of 2014, after he put Transformers: Age Of Extinction at No.1, yet it made more money than anything else released that year.
However, what Kermode often does, here and any time I’ve seen his film review programme on BBC News, is to make reference to films you’ve never heard of, saying they relate to a more modern release in some way. This is the man who’d make the connection between a scene from the latest Marvel movie and how it’s a direct descendant of an obscure arthouse release from 1931, for example, if he could get away with it.
Still, even if you’re not the biggest fan of Mark Kermode – and even he can divide opinion as much as the question of which is better between DC and Marvel – there are so many different film clips in this first episode (and, I expect, all those to come) that everyone will find much to enjoy in this series.
If I had a complaint with Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema, it’s that not all film clips are in their correct widescreen aspect ratio, such as those for Bridget Jones’ Baby which are cropped to 16:9 – and the same for some of the clips of La La Land, and you’d think if one person was going to ensure all the clips were presented perfectly, it would be Mark Kermode!
Note, all the film clips are uncut, so if there’s an f-word in them, it’ll be present in this programme, although it does seem a bit odd when Mr K describes Richard Gere’s character Pretty Woman as a “rich asshole”. Even more bizarre is that he wasn’t even the original choice for that character. Who was? John Travolta! Just think, it could’ve been Travolta who was stood next to model Shelley Michelle, with Julia Roberts’ head replacing hers from the tie upwards! (yeah, sorry, it’s not Julia’s body!)
The second episode concentrated on heist movies, and I’m far more into this genre than rom-coms, so there was even more to enjoy this week. As well as films like Reservoir Dogs and Heat, and I love them both, there were others I’ve never seen before which I really need to do, such as The Departed and Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, as well as older films, Rififi and Dassin.
Episode 1 Score: 7/10
Episode 2 Score: 9/10
Presenter: Mark Kermode
Producer: Eric Haynes
Writers: Kim Newman and Mark Kermode
Series Producer: Nick Freand Jones
Mark Kermode’s Secrets of Cinema continues next Tuesday on BBC4 at 9pm, and is available to pre-order on DVD – ahead of its release on August 20th, and you can watch each episode on BBC iPlayer for 30 days after transmission.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.