The Good Doctor
November 10th, 2007 by Roo ReynoldsIt’s the weekend, so my dog walking is accompanied by a new edition of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s weekly film review.
(Image taken from the BBC user on YouTube. Thank you, BBC, for sharing interesting clips)
My early teenage years were informed by Mark Kermode on the Mark and Lard show on Radio 1, where he introduced me to a wide range of cult movies. In fact, I still can’t watch Blue Velvet without hearing his voice.
These days, the Good Doctor works well when paired with Simon Mayo, who does a great job of popping Kermode’s pretension and dropping in his own interpretations and insights, balancing Kermode’s often over-the-top rants (both for and against) recent films.
Kermode, normally very eloquent, is particularly enraged by ‘Good Luck Chuck’ in this week’s episode.
Kermode: And I’m literally sitting there thinking, I’m getting ill. It’s like, it’s infecting me, it’s like this…
Mayo: There’s a Woody Allen impression coming up now.
[...]
Kermode: This thing is eating my soul from the inside. I can actually feel my soul being sucked out through my ears. I can feel everything starting to shut down…
This began to remind me of an earlier review; Mark famously hates ‘Little Man’.
Kermode: I have seen some films that I consider to be grotesque, but I struggle to think of one more grotesque than ‘Little Man’. It is, in every way, an evil-minded, bad, profoundly depressing indictment of the way the modern movie industry works. … It is the most horrible, retrograde, nauseating, inward-looking, smug, repulsive, grotesque, ill-advised, badly judged…
Mayo: Patronising?
If you like Kermode’s reviews as much as I do then you’re probably already subscribed to the podcast. You’ll really enjoy the archive of his reviews going back to April 2005 too.
