Aside from having to go alone, there was one thing about the showing that bothered me…
Twelve dollars and change for a bag of popcorn and a small drink? :eek:
They have to put all their businesses on a paying basis. If they play it cheap, they’ll be living on welfare the whole winter.
We watched it on TCM, not a theater, but I wonder how the two shooting stars while they were on the boat showed up on the big screen. There’s some controversy whether they were filmed live or were add in post-production. Did you notice them? Did they look realistic?
I noticed one - the one behind Brody’s head - and to be honest, I don’t know how to tell if it was live or added in post. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an actual shooting star in person. The streak was reddish, if that’s any help.
Dangit, lots of times I’ll take a screenshot of an iconic scene in a movie and keep it on my phone, sometimes linking to it here. I have exactly that of the shooting star(s) and today I forgot it at home.
I’m convinced by the comments it’ll be worth it to go see Jaws at the theatre, 4K, in all it’s re-mastered glory and the biggest hoot will be bringing along the kid to watch her reaction too. It’s been 40 years, let’s see if my little girl scream is any deeper now.
You have one more chance, on Wednesday the 24th.
They’re usually an incandescent pale green. In real life, I’ve never seen a meteor as white and intense as the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk.
Coming soon to the SyFy Channel: Shark-Bambi!!
That scene set the stage for nearly the whole movie: It was scarier to NOT see the shark (which only happened because the mechanical prop wasn’t ready in time & broke down constantly). But in terms of seeing it, the scariest scene is in the middle, when it attacks Brody’s kid’s boat in the ‘pond’. That scene of the guy next to his overturned boat with the shark just visible underwaterturning its open mouth up toward him and grabbing him! Something about seeing it thru the water like that, still creeps me out today.
Just as the film is pure Spielberg the Hooper movie character is pure Richard Dreyfus. In the book he’s an unlikable scumbag (most of the characters are!). Dreyfus played him as the standard ‘likable rascal’-type he uses in almost all his roles. And although the film’s ending is decidedly ‘Hollywood’ Spielberg had no choice. In the book the shark is coming at Brody on top of the sinking Orca just like the film, but he’s not shooting at it, he’s just resigned himself to dying. The shark then…
…just coasts into him dead, having finally succumbed to all the harpoon wounds it’s endured.There’s no way that would have been a satisfying ending for a film.
Aye, matey.
I think you’re being way too generous to Hooper. He was an unlikable, brash, arrogant rich kid. Sure, he was right about almost everything (except Quint having a game fish on the line), but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a dick.
And yes, the novel ending would have killed the movie.
And for your amusement - the famous deleted scene of Quint buying piano wire.
Ready to purchase for tomorrow. Have a choice between IMAX and XD. Are they both 4K, because the IMAX has much better food.
If I’d watched this with my wife and kid at home they would have paid attention to about 10% of it, so that was one of the best things about the theater experience, time with them and having a captive audience. Yes, my kid absolutely jolted when the head came out the bottom of the boat.
Two of my favorite scenes, one I’d remembered frequently and one I’d forgotton; when the ransom-grubbing fishermen were on the dock with the erroneously implicated shark, someone asked what kind of shark it was, Hooper said* “It’s a Tiger Shark”* and the large, camo-clad guy says *“A whaaat?” * I’ll sometimes work that into conversations when someone throws a boner out there.
Secondly, in the town hall meeting when Quint makes his appearance he scratches his fingernail on the chalkboard and everyone turns, cringing at the sound. The second woman to do so, an older, Mildred Natwick-looking lady in a blue dress has the funniest look of abject horror on her face and I did again laugh out loud in the theater.
A wonderful experience and so glad we went.
There’s something else I picked up on. I notice that some of the shows I watch are produced by Bad Hat Harry Productions. I always thought that was a cool name. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched Jaws in my life, but I never made the connection to the production company until watching it on the big screen.
As I mentioned in another thread, I dropped off my 15yo and his friend to see it yesterday. And spent the rest of the day in something of a mental wreck, as I saw it when I was 15, and this can’t possibly be the 40th Anniversary release. The 30th Anniversary edition a few years ago was clearly a prank. Right? Right?
Anyway, Barbarian Jr has quite a sophisticated eye for film, and his friend is… insightful but a little biased towards grade-Z moves as pinnacles of entertainment. (Star Crash was too polished for him; he’d prefer The Incredible Bulk. Really.)
The ride home was a deep, thoughtful conversation about how some movies hold up, and how well they compare to the source novels. Huh.
So would have including the affair between Hooper and the wife. So here’s to directors who know what to change and what to leave alone…
…and what to leave out, in the end. God, that’s painfully stupid.
Is Shaw’s drunken take on the ‘Indianpolis’ speech available anywhere?
I took my little brother and his pal when it first came out all those years ago.
None of us could sit with our feet on the floor–the 3 of us sat there on curled up legs.
And the next day we flew off on a beach vacation !
He was brash and arrogant, but I always felt he was still likable. Brody is a completely sympathetic character but his friendship with Hooper made sense. Quint’s initial hatred of Hooper is also amusing and logical, as it’s little more than a generation gap/class thing (and directly reflected Shaw and Dreyfus’ relationship on set). You understand why Quint doesn’t like him, but Quint himself still remains very likable in spite of it. There’s even a final acknowledgement of respect of Hooper by Quint as he’s willing to go down in the shark cage to save them (especially with it being Quint’s fault that they’re stranded).
Actor Sterling Hayden (Gen. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove and Capt. McClusky in The Godfather) was originally cast to play Quint. As great an actor as he is I can’t imagine anyone but Robert Shaw…
I just watched Jaws for the first time in a long time last night and I must say, what a load of…great cinema! Only slightly dated, Jaws has held up surprisingly well as an adventure/drama/thriller, despite our becoming accustomed to and jaded toward much grittier movies of this genre since 1975.
Alas, I didn’t see it on the big screen last night, but I did crank up my subwoofer to shake the house during the da nuh…da nuh…danuh danuh danuh danuh scenes….Let me tell you, it’s not often you hear a pair of teen/pre-teen kids tell their parent, “turn down that racket!” Sweet revenge from all that Dubstep nonsense they blast in my ears. :mad:
I first saw Jaws on its first run on the big screen with my friends (we were the teens back then…but we didn’t listen to dubstep, just good ol’ R&R…and a little Disco) at the Jersey shore. After the show: “you guys wanna go swimming?” “Uh…how ‘bout we just go out for pizza, instead?!?” (We watched the first run of the Exorcist a couple years before that—it’s amazing we all didn’t develop PTSD before leaving our teen years).
Kudos to Spielberg. Even in his early years as a director he knew how to create a stylized movie and strike the exact right balance between believability and drama/horror. He pushed the envelope of realism, but not too far beyond what you could accept as possible.
If you want 100% believability, the only way to get that would be to witness shark attacks first hand, in person. But, that would make for an exceptionally dull movie: 2 minutes of pure horror followed by ~118 minutes of lackluster bureaucratic procedure and tedious dialogue. Boring…unless you were the shark’s menu item.
Documentaries fare a little better on the excitement scale, but lose points on the believability scale compared to first had experience, what with their quick cut edits and cherry picked experts with a flair for the dramatic. You don’t often see many Dr. Milquetoast PhD’s featured on TV documentaries.
No, if I want to feel the rush of adrenaline from an account of a monster, man-eating shark on a killing spree, I don’t want to experience it in real life and I don’t want to watch a dramatized, but still boring shark documentary, I want to see a well-crafted and almost totally believable movie starring 3 talented, well-casted actors and a rarely seen robotic Great White shark on the silver screen—I want to see Jaws.
Spielberg was smart to show restraint. Quint estimated Jaws to be 25’ and 3000lbs, which is the extreme high end of Great White shark growth. There have actually been reports of slightly larger specimens. If they went with a 50’ great white for the shock value, I’d have a problem with that, as would most of you, I suppose. And, sharks don’t normally sink boats and eat the occupants like Jaws, but great whites have been known to bite chunks out of boats and also eat people who’ve landed in the water from boats. So, I can believe a shark or three somewhere, sometime probably did sink a boat or three, then eaten its occupants—I can buy that premise. It is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Some of the Jaws cast were certainly caricatures, but only slightly so. And that’s not a fault, it’s a feature. Let’s face it, even if you think you’re the most exciting person in the world, if someone were to film 120 minutes of even the most exciting part your life and put that out as a movie, it’s got 0 chance to become a blockbuster. You are just not as exciting as a good actor with a good script.
For example, a mayor so obsessed with summer resort income for his town at the expense of total disregard for public safety, like Mayor Vaughn, is a little hard to swallow, but I’m sure there’s some mayor somewhere who would act pretty much exactly that way—so I accept that premise. Quint was a bit too gruff and careless; Hooper a bit too idealistic, rich and prescient for his own good and Brody was a bit too righteous and daring-do when faced with his biggest phobia: water. But, I can accept the unlikely grouping of these extreme types of people, because it could conceivably occur in real life.
It was also fortuitous that Jaws was only onscreen for a very short time (the less amount of time you see the “monster” in a thriller/horror movie, the more the tension builds…why don’t more directors understand that?). Apparently, Spielberg can’t be credited entirely for that good idea; it was supposedly mechanical failure of the robotic shark that led to the decision to show it much less onscreen than originally proposed.
Jaws. Great movie all around…with exceptionally bad sequels. It would have been much better if, in the original, in the closing scene, with the camera shooting from behind Brody and Hooper who were swimming toward shore, they showed a very large tentacled arm or two pop up from the surface and reach toward the unaware duo…then faded to black screen. It would have set up for a much better series of sequels.
I watch Jaws almost every time it is aired on T.V.
I even have a good part of the dialogue memorized.
When I tell my wife that Jaws is on again, she’ll respond in a droll way “Ai, por dios santo, el tiburon otra vez”…
It’s kind of a running joke in my household {my wife does not like the movie}.
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