MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: INNOCENT BYSTANDERS (1972)

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Like just about everyone with an interest in the movies, I'm watching more films on DVD and going out to movie houses a lot less. Convenience trumps the better experience.
Of course, you lose audience interaction and the poor film now has to compete with all the comforts of home.
It's a bit like seeing Rembrandts & Titians in a book reproduction, or from posters with iffy color values, no texture or weight to the surface and the wrong dimensions . . . all while snacking on chips & soda. (Oops! You get that at your local cinema,too.)
The ease of instant movie gratification risks turning an art form (well, sometimes) into little more than low-grade eye-candy & mindfodder. So, maybe it's worthwhile to write a bit down on what we're all viewing, just to keep fully engaged.

DVDs: the latest opiate of the people meets the internet, where everyone's a critic.
God help us.

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Saturday, January 25, 2014

INNOCENT BYSTANDERS (1972)

It’s sideburn heaven (or hell) in this James Bond wannabe that lands with a brutal thud, falling between the cracks of outright spoofery and serious intentions. Stanley Baker, looking & acting like an unkempt Welsh stand-in for Sean Connery, never gets a rhythm going under Peter Collinson’s painfully amateurish megging, and neither spy masters Dana Andrews & Donald Pleasence, gal pal Geraldine Chaplin or a motley assortment of bad guys bring anything fresh to the party. Nor does the McGuffin, something about a revolutionary desalination process. Talk about excitement! Whatever interest there is lies in an unusually high level of sadistic violence for the date and in an opening prison-break prologue set in a Russian Gulag. This first reel is entirely different in tone & in simple directorial competence from everything that follows. Best guess is that without any of the leading players involved, it got dealt off to Assistant Director Clive Reed whose credits include DR. NO/’62; THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES/’65; HELP!/’65; and CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE/’66. Too bad they didn’t let him make the whole film. After that, there’s nothing but those outrageous sideburns to hold our interest.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

Saturday, January 25, 2014

INNOCENT BYSTANDERS (1972)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE