THE MOVIE DOCTORS is a terrific tome by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, two chaps who have spent decades in dark cinemas, have taken their cinematic scalpels, and with surgical precision, cut into the subcutaneous layers of the quintessential art form of the 20th Century.
Having said that, here’s a book dedicated to dinosaurs. To all the projectionists and ushers of the world. The fall of the usher seems a quaint and curious occupation of forgotten lore, followed like a dying ember, likewise, the projectionist, is nevermore.
THE MOVIE DOCTORS is as much about the health of the exhibition of cinema as the content of the films.
As the movie doctors are blunt in saying, “A building without a projectionist isn’t a cinema. It’s a sweet shop with a video”.
However, they are aware that most consumption of film in the digital age is at home, and so are full of remedy for those who like to watch in the privacy of their own homes, or wherever.
The book is full of antidotes and anecdotes, from the conception, gestation, and birth of individual films, and makes for compulsive viewing – er, reading.
We learn of the successful surgery endured by Annie Hall, a film that first clocked in at two and a half hours.
Indeed, the doctors take major issue with the chronic morbid obesity afflicting much of modern movie fare and cite the benefits of the lean. For example, Paul Thomas Anderson’s PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, his best film, was his shortest.
After the lean and mean Reservoir Dogs, Quentin tended to go to fat, and the doctors suggest, quite rightly, Tarantino could be vastly improved by the celluloid equivalent of liposuction.
There’s a fascinating piece subtitled Settling Scores which focuses on two particularly famous fallouts between composers and directors– Alex North, who composed Spartacus, an early success for Kubrick wrote a score that was scrapped for Stan’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Exorcist, which like Space Odyssey ended up using existing music, saw both Bernard Herrman and Lalo Shiffrin given the boot.
The Movie Doctors proscribe and prescribe an enormous amount of pictures in this three hundred plus page book, but insist that two movies that will cure absolutely anything are LOCAL HERO – if not you’re already dead, and AMADEUS – a movie with Simon Callow.
Imaginative, provocative, informative, and vastly entertaining, THE MOVIE DOCTORS is a diagnostic delight on all things film.
THE MOVIE DOCTORS by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode is published by Canongate