It’s “Beadlemania” in Manga UK’s 22nd podcast

Jeremy Graves is joined by Jerome Mazandarani, Andrew Hewson and Jonathan Clements for a run-down of what’s coming up and what’s going on, available to download now. Contains the phrases: “engine of Japanese oppression,” “invaded by bots,” “secret file from the chamber of balrogs” and “where do you think all the cocaine’s been hidden?”

00:00 The song that ruined Christmas.

01:30 Introductions all round, which turn out to be largely wrong.

03:50 Jerome paints a Yuletide picture, using only words.

04:20 Bad marketing ideas from Gatwick Express.

05:00 Round-up of the December releases. Jude Law, not appearing in anime near you any time, ever.

07:00 Confessions of slippage. Rounding off the year with Wolf Children. Check out the unboxing video.

09:00 The traditional Andrew Partridge baiting session, and tales of his odd fetish for ice cream. Other odd things you can buy in a Japanese convenience stores. The world’s greatest segue, ruined by everyone else.

11.00 Evangelion 3.0, coming in March. Controversy arising over The Wind Rises, Miyazaki’s best- and worst-reviewed film ever. Chinese reactions to Studio Ghibli, as demonstrated in Lifeweek magazine.

17:30 Looking back on 2013 – highlights including moustaches, conventions and stuff. The prospects for Attack on Titan, convention disasters, and the high road to Scotland.

29:00 “A Buddhist purple cat that never does anything and then dies.” Comments on judging films, with time out to discuss coalition politics and the Evening Standard awards.

34:45 The Kuroko basketball threats, and other scams and scandals arising in the Japanese media.

36:00 The perils of licensing sports anime. Hidden synergies in Summer Wars.

39:00 The nature of female fandom, and its long-overlooked presence in the history of anime (as noted by Paul Dini).

42:00 The Hell of Heidi: “We’ve created perfection, you morons!”

44:00 Jerome takes on Ofcom, and explains where all the pornography is hidden.

46:50 Godzilla, and re-enacting it in your living room.

49:20 Ask Manga UK. What pre-2000 anime do you think deserves an HD redo?

50:50 Giving credit where credit is due. Steve Kyte unmentioned on Firestorm, and Spike Lee’s response to an offended artist on Oldboy.

57:00 Which releases have surprised you in terms of 2013 sales?

59:00 Possible title issues with Tiger and Bunny.

59:30 Watching Manga UK releases on iTunes.

61:45 What effect will disintermediation have on your business model? Predictions for anime becoming a closed circle of consumption, less visible to the public.

67:50 The possibility of Jormungand appealing to al Qaeda.

70:00 Jerome explains content-driven marketing.

72:00 The legal tangle of the Macross licence.

75:00 Has there been an increase in Blu-ray sales this year? It is now cheaper to release stuff on Blu-ray than DVD! Who would have thought it?

78:30 The chances of a Manga UK modelling agency.

80:30 What’s coming up on Blu-ray in 2014.

81:30 Why can’t we have Celtic Frost back?

84:00 It’s the final QUEST-ion! Doodle-doo-doo… A few other surprises coming in 2014.

88:20 Anime: A History, and the trouble you might have getting one signed. Andrew thinks you should all see Nebraska. And Jerome confesses his love for Perfect Blue. And Saint Seiya: Brave Soldiers.

91:00 And with that, we’re out. Bye for this year.

The Podcast is available to download now HERE, or find it and an archive of previous shows at our iTunes page. For a detailed contents listing of previous podcasts, check out our Podcasts page.

I’ve never met Mark Kermode, but often used to seen him at press screenings, his fifties-throwback quiff circling the pre-film drinks like a shark’s fin. And I’ve often read or watched him, of course, hectoring his co-host about the awfulness or lack thereof of some film or other, or babbling on immediately leaving a cinema, as a sort of experiment to see how his later, considered opinion measures up to his improvised first impressions. And my mum refers to him as That Lovely Mark Kermode, primarily because of something he once said comparing Casablanca and Silent Running.

Hatchet Job, Kermode’s latest book, is not a book of film reviews, but about film reviewing, charting the many odd situations and pressures on the professional critic. Anime only gets a passing mention, but readers of this blog will nevertheless be fascinated by the many practices of the modern movie world, all of which affect Japanese cartoons just as much as Hollywood blockbusters. What actually happens at a movie screening? Who gets to go, and why? Why do some films not get press-screened at all? What kind of difference do critics make? And in a world where so much is given away free, how much is a film review worth?

The book’s greatest achievement is the way it smuggles in an immense amount of posh, post-modern critical theory, without a single buzz-word, name-drop or citation. Like the best of Empire, Kermode puts a populist, accessible front on concepts that lesser authors turn into psychobabble. He mounts an argument for movie reviewing as a conversation, an ever-changing discourse about the film we’ve seen, wondering if it’s ever possible to even have a concrete opinion on a film when we keep changing as viewers. And so, indeed, does the film – Kermode lifts the lid on the infamous two versions of Fatal Attraction, where Japanese audiences got the original Madama Butterfly-inspired ending, whereas the rest of us had to contend with the KILL THE BITCH version cooked up to appease slack-jawed American test audiences. He recounts horror stories of critics who have had to change their minds, and debates the dubious value of being “first” with a review that one later regrets. In a world that so often focuses on production (making-ofs, staff interviews) or reception (what some people think of a film they have seen), he deftly and wittily discusses the often neglected areas of distribution and exhibition – such as how marketing can affect a movie’s performance, or what differences can accrue in a particular cinema on a particular day.

Hatchet Job is an account of two cultures. One is the movie-nerd discourse of “what we talk about when we talk about films”, in which Kermode covers not only the power of reviewers to bring people into cinemas, but also the silent sector of people who wait until after they have seen a film to read the reviews, in order to enter into a virtual “conversation” with a critic – for this very reason, I have been a subscriber not-reading the most recent Sight & Sound for the last 26 years. The other culture is that of movie-reviewers themselves, offering a rare insight into the traditions and protocols, the rituals and behaviours of breeds such as the lesser-spotted Kim Newman and the now-extinct Roger Ebert. This includes, although Kermode is too cunning to scare people off by using the word, a historiography of film writing, in which he charts the way that critics have redefined and reconceived their own role in the process of bringing a film to a viewer. His willingness to focus on the mechanics behind the scenes of distribution also leads to an intricate critique of the algorithms that decide which Amazon review you will see, and the underhand “vote-washing” undertaken by semi-pro critics who stand to be paid in freebies and sub-cultural capital if their reviews get lots of Likes. This is particularly interesting to Kermode (and to anyone who thinks about film) because of its implications as a “fake” conversation, as robots pretend to like the comments of other robots, while movie adverts quote enthusiastic reviews by sock-puppets.

Ever since Joe Queenan’s unforgettable stunt of Being Mickey Rourke For a Day, in which he only said or did things that he had seen Rourke do in films, modern film critics have often pepped things up with little comedy business, and Kermode is no exception. He includes the full text of his Twitter review of Prometheus, which, in a vain attempt to protect fanboys from spoilers, he wrote entirely in mathematical notation. He speculates about the prospects of hiring Rutger Hauer, in his role as the replicant Roy Batty from Blade Runner, to voice the late-train announcements for the 2:35 from Weymouth. And he offers an account of his short-lived brainwave, inspired by Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to insult everyone whose film he hates, to their faces. He is winningly frank about the things he has learned from his own mistakes – the throwaway dismissal of a film that got him briefly blacklisted and; the absurd spy-movie acrobatics required to see Nixon early, which involves a trip on Eurostar and an argument in Franglais with a Gauloise-chuffing ticket gendarme, all so he can “watch a Welshman pretending to be an American, in English, with French subtitles.”

In addition to smuggling in elucidating jargon-free accounts of memory and commemoration, temporality, discursive genealogy and auteurism, Kermode alludes to the simple pleasure of movie-going, both as an excited participant in packed movie event, and as a lone explorer at a daytime matinee. I, too, have sat in the Odeon Leicester Square with a variety of audiences that have transformed my viewing experience, and not always for the better – the pair of eccentric millionaires (I can only assume they were eccentric millionaires) who paid £20 for a ticket and then talked all the way through Vantage Point. The two Polish prostitutes who decided the best way to get out of the rain was to sit through Apocalypto offering me sinful companionship. And Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting who was in the same cinema as me watching Inglourious Basterds. I was immensely impressed to see that the would-be-Sir-if-he-hadn’t-said-no national treasure was not above avoiding the freebie screenings that come with BAFTA membership, and instead paying with his own money to see the new Tarantino with the rest of us.

No, I didn’t pester him with an actual conversation, either, but I did eavesdrop on his concise review, imparted to his companion as we left.

“Tee-hee-hee,” he chuckled. “Nazis!”

This review originally appeared on the Manga UK blog in October 2013, and is reshared here after the website was shut down in 2021 by its new owners at Funimation.