For the last three years I've been writing for a UK men's magazine. Three years... That's a long time in the mag-world, where—as my father-in-law says—"things get different quickly." They used to fly me around the place to interview people. In Chicago Jenny McCarthy confided to me (and my 200,000 readers) that she shaved her pubic hair. In Manhattan Liz Hurley said... She didn't say much actually, but I observed her poor skin tone and ruminated upon the price of fame. On Sunset Boulevard I laid my hands on Christina Ricci's "wonderfully over-evolved" (my words) forehead. I was a bushy-tailed young hack, is what I'm trying to get across, well-commissioned and keen for glory. And now I'm an old man of the seabed, caked in rusted treasure, my beard wafting like the briny weed and my eyes pale and infernal. The cash-money celebrity interviews float by... I reach for them weakly, I fail... the e-mails drift, unanswered... unread?... who cares? Just me, and then only barely. I feel I am close to men's-mag extinction. But still I cling, with frail fire, to one thing—the escutcheon clutched as it were to my all-but-fleshless breast: my film column! My regular gig! 750 words, once a month, upon the Current Cinema. So before the waters sift my bones entirely and my hack-soul flickers off through the depths let me just set down here, for your dear benefit, a few of the things I have learned about the mighty art of Film Criticism.

Reviewing, let's be clear, is a joke, and reviewers know it better than anyone. The critic sits preening on a manure-heap of other men's product, filing his nails abstractedly over their best efforts, tossing off plaudits or spitting like a llama when the mood takes him. And then he gets paid. What a profession! No wonder all the authors/actors/directors/rockstars/creators want to kick our heads in. But let them be consoled, because if one cares at all about writing—which most reviewers, pathetically, do—then the job is full of terrible dangers, chief among them being Style Pollution, which quickly becomes moral pollution, which is nothing less than the ancient tragic fate of the hack. You can't blame the magazines for this: men's magazines have their business to do, and so they must perforce explode off the racks in a shell-burst of peaked nipples and block capitals—they must prickle, titillate, inflame, cavort—they must transport the reader to men's-mag havens of sex and power, to the Planet Of Ass itself, where the shagging is free and the money is good and a pair of celestial bollocks toll gong-like in the firmament. No, any writer who enters this realm and finds himself writing crap has only himself to blame.

Nonetheless, knowing (as I thought) all this, I was surprised by the eagerness with which I fell into what I will call the Low British or Softcore Style. This is writing which owes its energies and aesthetic values mainly to the standard men's-mag visuals which surround it, i.e., to all the shots of unbelievable varnished women coiled on car-bonnets or draping their cleavage into the lens. Something in these pictures bleeds, like strip-bar neon, into the paragraphs and pages around them, until every line is softcore: chatty, libidinous, flatteringly lit, all tarted up in the man-made fabrics of irony and innuendo. Being simultaneously saucy and unreal, softcore is incorrigibly euphemistic. You might start calling sex "the mattress mambo," for example. "So-and-so, last seen doing the mattress mambo with So-and-so in Such-and-Such"—like that. And seeing as how most magazines are really just high-priced catalogs, in bondage to advertisers, softcore also partakes of the tinny clamor of competing product, the need to SELL. A reviewer in the softcore mode will breathily overpraise some minor film or book, becoming a sort of semi-conscious copywriter for that particular studio or publisher—"Arse Bandit is this year's first slam-dunk classic!" I myself have described a film released in February as the best British film of the year—pure softcore! Such hyperbole is either routinely deadening, or there can be a kind of desperation in it, as if the writer, groping for sincerity like a bad drunk, is looking to redeem himself through a passionate act of advocacy: "I implore you—do NOT missThe Philanderer." or "If you are not moved by My Petals, My Love, your heart is stone." (PR companies love this shit, of course.) Almost as common as excessive praise is excessive vilification, in which the writer, drunk with power or (much worse) responsibility, brings awesome batteries of disdain to bear on something much better ignored or forgotten. (I just did this in a review of the sci-fi movie Pitch Black.) The writing here might be somewhat hard-edged and oppositional, and thus not apparently softcore, but for a writer to be squandering intellectual energy on a crap film—this is the very APEX of softcore. With every dagger-flash of an idea, every canny put-down, the reviewer struggles further into the bag. The late Bill Hicks knew this, as he knew many things: he had a routine where somebody was trying to offer him an intelligent critique of Basic Instinct and he would interrupt every sentence by shouting "PIECE OF SHIT!". "But surely the post-feminist—" "PIECE OF SHIT!" "And what about the—" "PIECE OF SHIT! PIECE OF SHIT! FORGET ABOUT IT!"

Recoiling in confusion from the Softcore Style I have sometimes found myself speaking in another, perhaps more sinister voice: that of a whey-faced priest or deacon, approximately fifty-two years old, who has been much disappointed but who labors still in his poor way after perfection. This is what I call my New Yorker voice, because its tone of wan, sniffy omniscience is part of said organ's house style. Fastidious. A God's-disappointed-eye-view. Bogus objectivity obscenely blended with fine language—you know what I'm talking about. In this character the critic addresses the reader from an abstract religious height, his eyelids pedantically fluttering, his judgments dispensed like communion wafers. In my column, by way of example, I have praised Magnolia as the work of "a young man" (how old am I, for Christ's sake?) "whose reach is almost as grand as his ambition"; I have lauded the "extraordinary beauty" (meaningless) of The Thin Red Line, and approved the "visual poem" (pure arse!) that is The Truman Show. For some reason it is the act of endorsement that brings on these pieties, which are really just a flowery way of saying "Two thumbs up!" To find fresh ways of praising is difficult—you have to think about it—much better to stink up your sentences with the incense of critical authority and hope nobody reads them twice.

As a rule, a review in the New Yorker or Deacon mode will be significantly longer—perhaps two or three times longer than a Softcore piece. In theory this allows the critic to accumulate solemnity and seriousness, to cultivate the full flower of his insight; in practice it involves him in extensive use of his computer's Word Count function. Only 1635 words doneŠ shit... another—what?—1365 to go? Damn. How to fill the space? You've got two options here: the first and most popular is to descant pleasingly upon the movie's PLOT, offering musical asides, witty little grace notes, stabs of comment and foppish flutters: But just as we are getting used to this novel situation, our hero suffers an unexpected reversal... And so on. This raises the ghost of an ethical dilemma—am I spoiling it for the potential moviegoer?—but it is structurally sound and good for at least 500 words. Your other option is to go for the movie's CHARACTERS (and the actors who play them) and write about them as if you invented them yourself, in brief, stinging phrases of sub-novelistic description: With his merry-old-soul complexion and soiled handkerchief of a voice, Ted Knacker is the blah blah blah. This is a little bit harder than the plot option, a little more thought-intensive, but it is ideal for the frustrated fiction-writer (me), whose reviews then become occasions for high literary exercise.

My problem with the New Yorker mode, insofar as I have used it (or been used by it) myself, is this: it is an absolute lie. It presents the reviewer as someone who confronts the screen with his brain gorgeously poised, his intelligence pent and strumming. From my own experience I can tell you that this is crap, because in a movie theater I have no critical faculties whatsoever: in a movie theater I am no longer myself, I am some sort of primitive Other or Shadow-Me, only half-aware at best, amorphous, apolitical, sexually available, just a sluttish heap really. And I'm fairly confident that most of my fellow moviegoers are in a similar state. There might only be three of us in there, on a wet afternoon—three blokes, spaced discreetly through the darkly ranked seats, as if we're staking the place out or shadowing each other, watching 9 and a 1/2 Weeks or Two Moon Junction or Wild Orchid—or there might be five hundred. The point is that for the brief hour or two of moviedom we are mystically conjoined, we are one body, one brain. We sit slumped or bonelessly splayed, as if blown backwards from the screen, and the images dilate across our pupils, enormously, like shockwaves. The air is thick with trance, with a mass metabolic go-slow. We are slurping, slurping, on frosty jolts of Cola. We are chewing, chewing, on a hot dog, on an industrially-processed wad of pig-lips, cat's ears, and wet breadcrumbs, and our guts are running up sour debts to be paid in future farts. In the darkness you feel your relationship to Hollywood, you can actually feel it, that complicated process of suction and injection whereby your head balloons with false light while your dollars, your juices, your body heat, and even the trapped illuminations of your own skull, your personal inviolable brain-lights, are drawn slowly and skillfully out of you. And when the credits softly scrolling say "Go in Peace," then and only then will you stand up and stagger out, seared with electrical pallor. Such is the magic of movies; we might describe it as advanced techno-witchery in the service of primordial awe. To misquote some old Italian: "The movies have always been with us."

Of course one has one's opinion, and perhaps reviewing films has encouraged me to think harder about them—certainly there have been moments when, sitting in front of something that I would normally have received with untroubled grunts of animal amusement, I have felt my frail, bedridden intellect hoist itself onto one elbow to make a few querulous complaints (about structure, say, or dialogue). Not long ago, for example, I saw Corruptor with Marky Mark Wahlberg and Chow Yun Fat. I reviewed it thus: Utterly sterile, comprehensively fourth-rate gangster-flick in which every ear-smashing carcrash and gunshot merely serves to drive home the fact that you are sitting in a bucket of plastic and fabric and dying by slow, certain degrees. Mark Wahlberg and Chow Yun Fat stagger like sleepwalkers through a pointlessly complex plot, pausing only to have conversations of such dreamlike idiocy you will think you have passed out. Absolutely unworthy of your time. This is obviously a prime example of excessive vilification syndrome—I mean, who cares?—but nonetheless the disgust I felt was real, so real in fact it was akin to an allergic reaction, a great swelling and reddening, as if I had suddenly become extravagantly, disproportionately sensitive. And ranting like that, all frothed up with indignation, actually led to a what I think may be a significant breakthrough in my critical consciousness. Groping for insults, trying merely to be rude, I accidentally grabbed a piece of real treasure when I described Mark Wahlberg and Chow Yun Fat as being "like sleepwalkers": this perception of the actor as victim, as the mere host-body for some crude thrust of Will, was new to me, and it opened my eyes. I saw how in an age of post-human cinema we will be looking for flickers of mortality in our actors, and not some feigned Streepian weepiness either but real biological mortality. We'll be looking to see them confused by the script, panicked by the direction, sweating uncomprehendingly through the big scenes. The worse they are, the closer we will be to them. Terrified eyes over cyber-perfect cheekbones, booms and whistles of anxiety in the movie-star voice, an ineradicable gracelessness that tells us—yes, I am one of you... I am one of the resistance.

But most days I'm still switching helplessly between modes, babbling Softcore or intoning deacon-style like a cheap medium. So I have to ask: what, or where, or who, goddammit, is the real voice of film writing? the voice uninflected by market pressure or fraudulent artistry? the voice adequate to the bad-film-disaster-area we currently inhabit? Is THIS it?: "What was displayed in theaters near you was not movies but certain side-effects of a large-scale fleecing project." In the words of Hong Kong Phooey, "Could be..."