In Praise of Schlock Cinema
I love movies. They take me to places I’ve never been, show me things I’ve never seen, introduce me to people I’d never otherwise meet. They entertain me, and they make me think. Most of the time.
I won’t go into specific examples of what I think is good or bad. I have wide-ranging tastes, and in the end, it’s really just my opinion. As the saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. All I know is that I don’t want my taste in cinema to be guided by the conventional view of what is good versus what is bad, and that happens a lot in our hyper-critical society. Critics and self-appointed film scholars often say that blockbusters are empty and mindless, foreign films are brilliant, and low budget genre films are schlock.
Well, some of that schlock is rather fun. Not every movie has to change my life. Sometimes I just want to put my brain on a shelf, sit back, and be entertained.
That’s how I discovered an appreciation for Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. I recently watched, and highly recommend, a 2014 documentary I found on Netflix, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films.These were guys who genuinely loved everything about movies. They loved watching them, they loved making them, and they loved coming up with new ways to entertain audiences.
