images from Steven Spielberg's first four creature features
Showing posts with label jaws. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jaws. Show all posts
The Favorites - Jaws (#71)
What it is • The body of a young woman washes up on the beach; a little boy is butchered on a sunny day; a man is devoured in what should be a safe inlet while everyone else is distracted by a hoax down the beach. A new cop discovers that the tourist trade is more important than public safety; a knowledgeable oceanographer clashes with the ingrained ignorance of a small town; a physically and psychologically scarred veteran of war and seafaring is consumed by his obsession with bagging the fish of the century. Is this movie about a giant killer shark or is it about a group of men clashing with one another and challenging themselves? For much of its runtime, Jaws plays like a well-executed slice of seventies New Hollywood cinema. The dialogue overlaps and overflows while the camera captures the action with a documentary sense of realism (which doesn't mean handheld shakey-cam but rather patient, fascinated observation of domestic routine). When action and suspense arrive, they are handled with Hitchcockian suggestion rather than roller-coaster revelation, and the screenplay ensures that our focus is on the very adult relationships among the townspeople, colored by economic need, political maneuver, class jealousy, and personal history (you can't beat Quint's Indianapolis speech, penned by John Milius - unless you have the alternate take in which Robert Shaw was actually drunk, which Spielberg himself owns and occasionally shows to lucky visitors). Yet as the film draws toward its conclusion, we see more and more of the shark itself. Bloody death, final showdown, and the film's only explosion ensure a crowd-pleasing conclusion to the picture. We can witness the birth of the modern blockbuster onscreen as the film journeys from Altmanesque social drama to action-packed showdown with a fantastical creature.
Why I like it •
Pray For Us Sinners 1974 - 1976 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 22
Pray For Us Sinners
The social spillover from the sixties continued into the mid-seventies. Whereas initially the frustration and alienation had been countered by a sense of excitement and community, by this time it just felt like rot. Watergate exemplified the United States' disillusionment with itself and its institutions, yet perhaps the country's misfortune was the cinema's good fortune. After focusing on Europe and Asia for several entries, today we return to America; for the first time in ten chapters, Hollywood films dominate the selections. But what a difference! If in 1959 the clips seemed to be quietly escalating their style and tiptoeing toward a more adult content, fifteen years later the American cinema has passed completely into a dark, radical maturity (fair warning: much of today's chapter is not safe for work).
(continued below, along with NSFW & spoiler warnings)
Jaws
Jaws, 1975, directed by Steven Spielberg
The Story: “Sharkkkkkkkk!!!!!!”
And yet it’s so much more than that. At its heart, of course, Jaws is a fantastic monster movie, a film that plays on fears – that employs Hitchcockian suspense and haunted house surprise to hold us in the grip of masterful entertainment. It has been blamed for a dumbing-down of movie audiences, an onslaught of blockbusters concerned only with reeling in adolescents, and a retreat from the edginess and depth of 70s cinema. Yet Jaws consistently holds human figures at its center – and not only because the mechanical creature malfunctioned through much of the production, while a 27-year-old newbie filmmaker, one Steven Spielberg, had to improvise shooting around it. At heart, Jaws is a story about people more than about a shark.
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