Read Online It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive by Mark Kermode - Free Book Online Page A

my ongoing envy. He also starred in The Fast Show which, for my money, is one of the funniest TV programmes ever.
    But I forgive him.
    Hot from my ‘page twenty-three, lower-left column’ success with the Higsons review I filed an equally hot-headed account of Orange Juice’s Hacienda show, by which time I began to feel that I had utterly conquered rock journalism. I still wrote with all the style and grace of an idiot fanboy who desperately wanted to be Lester Bangs but was more (as Kurt Vonnegut put it) Philboyd Studge. Yet I had learned two important lessons: firstly, that you should keep and file all your old press cuttings, because nobody else will;and secondly, that in journalism you can be whoever you want to be as long as you have enough front. And no shame.
    Of course, what I really wanted to be was a film critic (if I wasn’t going to be a pop star, which I clearly wasn’t and if the revolution wasn’t happening right now , which it didn’t seem to be), but there was no chance of that at Mancunion . Gig reviews were fine – you just paid to see the show then wrote about it the next morning. But film reviews had to be filed in advance and that meant gaining access to private preview screenings . figuring out who organised these secretive screenings, and where and when they happened, was difficult enough, let alone getting your name on the mystical ‘list’ which was spoken of only in hushed whispers and overheard asides. You remember all that nonsense that Tom Cruise’s character goes through in his attempts to get into the masked orgy in Stanley Kubrick’s rubbish Eyes Wide Shit (sorry, Shut ) – having to get a piano player drunk to prise the location out of him, then hiring a fancy dress get-up at midnight from some Slavic pimp-cum-costumier, then getting a taxi to drive for hours to the middle of nowhere before enduring hours of awful ‘plink plonk bong ’ avant-garde atonal piano squonking and failing to get even a blowjob despite being able to produce the password ‘ fidelio !’ when requested to do so by a man dressed as a chicken? You remember all that? Well, trying to get on to the Manchester film preview screening circuit was worse – and a lot less funny.
    For a while, I thought you probably had to kill someone and eat their still-beating organs in some Angel Heart -type twisted satanic ritual before the wanton pleasures of thepreview screening would be revealed to you. Later, I discovered that you just had to be ‘invited’ by someone ‘in the know’ – or to be ‘sent’ by a magazine, which in my case turned out to be City Life .
    City Life was a small but thriving Manchester listings magazine which had been set up in 1983 as ‘a cross between Time Out and Private Eye ’. Over the years the magazine had become an admirable thorn in the side of James Anderton, thanks largely to the persistence of news editor Ed Glinert who seemed to have an inside track on the chief constable’s bizarre beliefs. One story had it that a disgruntled copper had actually bugged his boss’ office and was feeding stories to Glinert (who stoically refused to reveal his sources). Whatever the truth, City Life was a flag-waver in the war against Anderton, and that made working for it a worthy cause indeed.
    Like City Limits in London, City Life was a workers co-op, which brought numerous benefits including (crucially) assistance from the Manchester Co-operative Development Agency, aka Mancoda. The co-op structure put in place a rigorously egalitarian framework within which everyone did everything and everyone was equal – at least in theory. In practice, the magazine was run by three quixotic editors: Glinert, Chris Paul and Andy ‘Spin’ Spinoza, all graduates of Mancunion , and all of whom would ultimately go on to excel in their various chosen professions.
    Spinoza was particularly industrious, becoming the diary editor at the long-running Manchester Evening News before setting up the thriving