Sunday 14 August 2011

Jaws


Moving away from 80s Groove for a while to an all-time classic, Jaws. Remember when Spielberg was great? I do because I am old. Jaws was a film that changed lives. In the little village I grew up in, when this was shown on TV, the whole village stayed in to watch it. Not kidding, they cancelled Girl Guides that night.

This is a brilliant film, it's sheer genius. The fact that special effects weren't up to showing a realistic shark made it so much more menacing. Spielberg built that suspense and you didn't need to see the shark, your imagination did all the work for you. Imagine Jaws today? It would be terrible with a great white shark in every scene and blood gushing everywhere. The joy of Jaws is that you imagine you've seen so much more than you have.

It has one of the great openings of films with the campfire and the girl running into the water. The way she is jerked under the water is truly terrifying. No scene is wasted in Jaws, it's a film student's dream to watch it. I see something new and different every time I watch it. The cast is fantastic, I especially like the kids in this, they are very real.

Basically it's a perfect summer movie. A generation of us were scared to go in the water for years after watching it. And it gave us the line "we're gonna need a bigger boat." This is my favourite scene but I can't embed it so let's watch the trailer here.




4 comments:

  1. 'So, eleven hundred men went in the water; 316 men come out and the sharks took the rest.'

    ReplyDelete
  2. And at the risk of channeling my inner Dawson O'Leary, I *heart* Steven Speilberg

    ReplyDelete

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