Jaws

Also, Williams' "Let's go on a big sea adventure!" score over the Orca scenes doesn't quite work.

maybe i'm forgetting something but he's never really directed a successful comedy right? anyhow question i'm guessing someone here might be able to answer: a few years back there was this blog w/ this guy writing about every spielberg film, house next door linked to it (when zeitz was still behind the site, before it merged w/ slant?), and then it turned out the guy was plagiarizing some book and that was that (i think the blog died and house next door certainly stopped linking to it in any case). my question: what was that book?

Catch Me If You Can was essentially a comedy. 1941 has its fans (and Robert Stack is funnier in it than he was in Airplane!).

I also consider The Terminal successful.

1941 has its moments (i vaugely recall) and i'm not gonna hate anything w/ wendie jo sperber. i thought maybe catch me if you can (or actually i thought maybe the terminal which i enjoyed also) but i was thinking something less ambiguously a comedy. i'm not even sure what would qualify besides 1941 (hook?). it's odd cuz he clearly has a strong sense of humor, most of his decent to great movies have at least one (usually more) very funny moment or scene, it's not like he's oliver stone or something.

Also, Williams' "Let's go on a big sea adventure!" score over the Orca scenes doesn't quite work.

*looks for ILX off switch!!*

hey balls, i think this might be the book - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Directed-Steven-Spielberg-Contemporary-Blockbuster/dp/0826416918

A friend just sent me this (yes, because I was asking him if he thought Jaws should be considered an action movie lol) and I'd never seen it before. I LOLd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92yHyxeju1U

btw I said it's not an action movie he said he guessed it could be considered one but he wouldn't class it as such personally.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=b5-oQ2fOnOc

So I was waiting for permission to post this but this is him and his wife and what I think is pretty much unquestionably the best Halloween duo costume effort ever:

http://i40.tinypic.com/24pdx09.jpg

A+

Blu-ray on the way, with restoration from the original negative

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzlqXJ80dJU

http://www.gofobo.com/news/spielbergs_jaws_heads_to_bluray_for_first_time_in_digitally_restored_and_remastered_edition_exc

cool.
but thought this bump was going to be connected with Jaws4 which I'm for some odd reason watching now.

What's funny/strange is that I don't recall previous DVD incarnations of "Jaws" looking as shitty as the examples they trot out there.

holy shit this looks great. but yeah the DVDs looked pretty good to begin with.

pretty amazing extras on the thing http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/11/jaws-blu-ray-august-14th/
from a geeky POV i like how the cover art is basically the original poster not that phony cartoony looking thing i have on my old late 90s VHS.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2012/04/jaws-restoration-still-2.jpg

I have literally never seen the film look bad as it does on the left.

yeah, they're lowering the target to make it look like they've worked miracles.

That preview ENBB posted in full of SPOILERS. Oh wait, I see.

this is a screen grab from my own copy, which is old but was already apparently a digitally remastered version.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2EVo9AQpCV8/T6EauPn1BjI/AAAAAAAAANc/wK_2FigVLS0/s1600/jawsnormal.png

"see this original 1975 release print that the projectionist's kid tossed into a washing machine not once but twice? pretty nasty huh? well get a load of this newly digitially mastered blu-ray..."

From Michael Sragow's appreciation:

In the extras on the new edition, it’s heartening to hear Spielberg and his fans (including buffs and directors as diverse as Bryan Singer, M. Night Shyamalan, Kevin Smith, and Eli Roth) take all the right lessons from this film’s success. For one thing, they admire the way it soaked up the atmosphere of an actual town with the help of non-actors who react like real people rather than like models in a beach catalogue. Anyone who wants to know what it was like to vacation in a coastal town in the mid-seventies can start with “Jaws.” It’s somehow poignant to see normal-sized bodies of all ages (neither ripped nor morbidly obese) lolling on the sand while rock or classical music rolls in with the thin, endearing sound of transistor radios.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/08/restoration-of-steven-spielbergs-jaws.html#ixzz23d1vPuMN

I appreciate the unabashed enthusiasm of that piece.

Dreyfuss has rarely gotten the credit he deserves for his skill at insinuating speedy comic rhythms into seemingly intractable material.

The scene with Dreyfuss, Scheider and Murray Hamilton in front of the billboard is a perfect example of this, and is also the greatest thing ever. His reaction after describing the size of the shark, and Hamilton's rejoinder, "Love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name in the National Geographic?" is a thing of beauty.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GwO45nxb-9k/TB8AAnyKDOI/AAAAAAAACbw/aFpUs5Eepp8/s1600/jm2.jpg

They're screening the new bluray for us at work over a couple of lunchtimes - we saw the first half yesterday and goddammit it's gorgeous.

And Phil otm about the billboard scene. Also the way Dreyfuss can add comedy without any dialogue at all. Just that look on his face like he's a teakettle ready to explode cracks me up.

I love that the films French title translates into English as "The Teeth of the Sea."

I wonder how much, if any, Dreyfuss was allowed to ad lib when working with Spielberg? There's a great moment in Close Encounters when Teri Garr gets upset with him after the kids say, "Dad said we could stay up and watch 'The Ten Commandments!'" and he replies, almost sotto voce, "I told them they could watch five of the commandments." That always struck me as an ad lib, and a funny one at that.

http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2014/07/jaws-ridiculous-say-kids-who-owe-everything-jaws

Dreyfuss kids not OTM.

on the Blu Ray the picture is so good the kill on the beach (where Brody has that out-of-body moment and the camera does the dolly zoom) is real bloody and nasty and realistic. i was shocked. like it's literally horrifying.

i just rewatched this yesterday, 4th of July viewing etc :)

goddamn I love Shaw

Dreyfuss kids not OTM.

Yeah, maybe I just think this because I've seen it so many times, but really how can you misremember who said the 'bigger boat' line?

I rewatched it a few nights ago too, stumbled upon it around 9pm and saw the last half (with ads). Watched with my parents, who have also seen it tons of times. My mother shrieked her head off.

dreyfuss kids should watch, provide thoughts on close encounters next

their favorite part is when godard plays 'Also sprach Zarathustra' on that giant trumpet to help summon ET.

Saw it last night in a big theater. Hadn't seen it in ~13 years. Perfect movie. A lot gorier than I remember. Everyone applauded when the shark exploded.

It's totally perfect. I watched this with my 11-year old daughter last week and she loved it. So then we watched Alien, and she liked it fine, but thought Jaws was so much scarier/grosser.

Alien at 11?! Your child may be superhuman, to tolerate something that boring.

Slow film, sure, but still striking. We started 2001 yesterday, and the monkeys meet monolith stuff had her asking so many questions I'm worried what I'm in for.

pic.twitter.com/Dfh1slnJva

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) July 29, 2018

all of those readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant

Saw it for the umpteenth time in a pretty packed rep theatre last night. I always felt that was the ideal way to see Jaws, but now that it seems to have turned into The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with people wildly cheering various lines and moments (Shaw's fingernails a big favourite), I'll have to rethink that. Couldn't find one of my favourite images online--the close-up of Scheider as he flips through the shark book.

I was 10 years old and on Martha's Vineyard for a week in the summer of 1974. My family was driving back from Edgartown to Menemsha, where we had our boat. We saw these cabanas erected at State Beach, which we'd never seen before, along with all these other strange-looking vehicles. We pulled over and asked some people what was going on. They said a movie was being filmed and they were looking for extras to be in the Fourth of July scene — $20 each. We asked the name of the movie and someone replied "Jaws." We thought that was the dumbest name for a movie ever, and we drove on.

Wow, this revive comes right after I made a "Jaws" joke on a different thread. Eerie. Anyway, this movie is perfect.

Bizarre thing that crossed my mind last night (won't make sense unless you've seen the film and are also a big baseball fan): Hooper is a sabermetrician, Quint is a curmudgeonly old-school scout.

"What have you got here?"

"A laptop."

"A laptop? You enter data into the laptop? Data tells you whether the player’s good or not? You don’t have to actually see the player play? Our player? Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies..."

Seen "Jaws" a hell of a lot, but we watched it as a family again last night. Imagine being Steven Spielberg and always knowing, somewhere in the back of your mind, that you were the one who made "Jaws." How cool is that.

Anyway, every time I've seen it I've noticed something else. This time I not only focused on how perfect every shot is as a storytelling device (the way each shot is framed to deliver vital information, and so on) but for the first time ever recognized that the reason Quint rides the engine into the red going back to the shore is not simply hubris and carelessness but because for the first time this tough guy is actually *scared*. The scene is preceded by him and Hooper (both shaken, now more or less peers of a sort) commenting ominously about how this shark is behaving differently from any shark they've ever seen. You can see Quint do the math, and that's when he floors it, muttering about luring the shark closer to shore, but you can tell he's desperate, almost as an excuse to get back himself. Of course they don't make it, and that's when Quint, formerly all macho bluster, turns to Hooper, as chastened as he'll ever be, and asks, just curious, that fancy poison you brought, do you maaaaybe think *that* will do the trick?

Still not entirely sure why Quint destroys the radio earlier. Macho, sure, or maybe out of frustration. Perhaps that's just his last chance to catch the shark on his own terms, because after that the tide (so to speak) really starts to turn against them.

We'd all seen the movie except my 12-year old, who thought it was OK though astutely recognized on her own that it's not *quite* a horror movie, because it's too much fun (adventure). Both kids kept commenting on how old everybody looked. Scheider was 43 and Lorraine Gray was I think around *38* but they both could have passed for (or been cast as!) much older parents if not grandparents today. And of course a lot of the other parents look really old too. The actress who played the mother of the boy who is eaten, Lee Fierro, was 46, about my age, but she looks like one of my mom's friends. I dunno, just another example of people looking old in the '70s, I guess.

Oh, another thing: never occurred to me that this is one of the rare movies that kills a kid *and* a dog, in the same scene!

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/europe/coronavirus-britain-boris-johnson.html

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain once said his political hero was the mayor in the film “Jaws,” praising him for defying mass hysteria to keep the beaches open after a constituent is eaten by a shark.

Spielberg’s probably the best suspense director this side of Hitchcock, with how he takes time to build tension not just within individual scenes but throughout the whole film. Just by withholding and hinting. I think the whole “the shark looked terrible so they had to compensate” aspect is probably only a bit true in terms of the film’s effectiveness; the creativity he shows throughout is astonishing. His ability there is also what raises something like Raiders of the Lost Ark to something beyond what its storyline might suggest.

The mayor is someone who seems like a caricature but he’s not an asshole, just a denialist. Unlike other authority figures who are roadblocks he makes sense: he likes Brody but he’s also not native to the island so he thinks he knows better. He’s got one of my favorite lines in this too: “we caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers.”

I always like how the mayor drives his entourage onto the ferry just to nag Brody, then when they reach the other side, he tells the ferry guy "OK, you can go back now," and you can see the ferry guy just shake his head in annoyance.

Re: withholding and hinting, it's quite striking how quickly everything starts happening. First shark attack happens literally 4 minutes in. But the second one, with the kid, is around minute 17. That one is one of the most frightening shots of the shark, just this blur coming into focus below the water that pulls him under. And then, from a distance, you just see this mass of splashing, thrashing and indistinct fins.

There's also the horrifying moment when they bring Hooper back to see the body, and they basically bring out a small drawer.