It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive, By Mark Kermode

The film critic Mark Kermode begins his breezy, entertaining autobiography by posing a question: what would a film about his own life be called? He comes up with a few suggestions. "The Man Who Watched the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance?" is one. I have another suggestion: "The Man Who Watched Werner Herzog Get Shot". When interviewing the German film director for The Culture Show back in 2006, a seated Herzog was shot in the abdomen by an unseen individual with a BB gun somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills. This is the story that book-ends his trip from Barnet to the BBC, Kermode's journey of the mind which starts with a mad-keen North London boy bicycling to watch movies at the Phoenix in East Finchley.

It's Only a Movie is a biography of a career rather than a hugely personal autobiography and it has, I would suggest, more than a nod to the self-deprecating cool of Toby Young's How to Make Friends and Alienate People. Perhaps How to Make Friends and Alienate People would be a better title for a putative Kermode film, since Kermode is best-known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Horror Genre; few of us would think of visiting 'The Exorcist Steps' on our honeymoon, but that's exactly what Kermode did. Kermode is easily the world authority on the film, and his book on it remains the best-selling guide the BFI ever produced. His first encounter with Linda Blair, the girl from The Exorcist, is a brief sketch of what is clearly an enduring friendship with the actress. While there's quite a bit about his political beliefs, especially as a student in Manchester, there's nothing about any religious convictions he might have, apart from the description of himself, at the end of the book, as a "dewy-eyed, God-bothering liberal critic".

As a Marxist Feminist in 1980s Manchester he began writing letters to the NME, and his dual interest in music receives some attention here (I especially enjoyed the bit about cutting up his much-coveted Hacienda, and now hugely collectable, membership card to create plectra for his guitar-band Russians Eat Bambi). He enjoys telling stories about how he blagged his way on to Time Out and the BBC, completely misrepresenting his level of experience to get hired, and utterly convinced he was always messing things up. He found out quickly that a certain amount of humour would always leaven the mix (his disdain of the wooden Ikea Knightley as he calls her certainly made me laugh) and he has learnt to make light of a serious intellect – he has, by the way, a PhD.

His anecdotes about mad egos are entertaining; his feud with Nick Broomfield (he dared to find Kurt & Courtney a bit off), which resulted in Broomfield spreading the story that he stormed out of a BBC studio because Kermode had a body-odour problem. I liked that Angelina Jolie loved his immaculately coiffed hair and thought Brad should copy it (he told her he already had in Johnny Suede – she'd never seen it). But I also happen to think that he's spot on in pretty much all his critical opinions here – the hype and misogyny of Lars von Trier, the brilliance of Blue Velvet, which like Kermode I first hated then loved, the vileness of the Cannes film festival and so on. But my favourite detail comes at the end.

Months after the shooting incident, Kermode interviewed Herzog onstage and asked whether his bullet wound still hurt. "Only when I laugh," replied the famously dour and serious Herzog. Only When I Laugh? Surely not.