Seized the opportunity to see Jaws (1975) in the theater today. That final act is so pristine on the big screen.
Feels like this movie is the highest and best use of Richard Dreyfuss. I know that by reputation he is probably a huge asshole, but this role channels his energies perfectly.
Little, if anything, to criticize about this movie. My favorite Spielberg is Schindler’s List, but as his more traditional blockbusters go it’s probably this one.
5/5
Did you ever see Tin Men?
I haven’t. It is already on my watchlist.
As a Dreyfus performance, I think it vastly exceeds Jaws for him. It’s basically peak a-hole Dreyfus.
Funny story about him is I was driving with a woman friend on Hollywood Boulevard on the way to golf in 1995 and he pulls up next to us at a stoplight. He began hitting on my friend. What a piece of work.
Single best scene in MI is the bit in MI1 where Tom Cruise is orally describing a sequence of events to a character but visually imagining a different sequence of events. It’s brilliant, it’s the kind of storytelling you can only do on film. Second best bit is in Fallout where Cruise has to play both sides of a shady arms deal --I’m pretty sure they stole that bit from Drug War, but that’s okay. If your movie is good enough, you can just straight-up steal ideas and get away with it.
I also like the scene in I think MI3 where Cruise does a mind blowing recon job inside a big building while the team waits outside to retrieve him. But instead of showing the mind blowing sequence inside the building, the shot stays on the team outside and you imagine everything happening inside from the sound effects coming over the comms.
dark victory (1939)
bette davis gives a really spectacular performance but who wants to watch a movie about a gorgeous young woman with an awesome life getting brain cancer in 1939? i was tricked into it by tubi autoplay but bette davis rocks
3 bags of popcorn
That’s in Ghost protocol, which came out 1 year before Drug war (both amazing movies of course)
Johnnie To is so good other filmmakers are pre-emptively stealing his bits.
Jaws is beautiful. A classic, excellent character development, hero’s journey in perfect form.
Shame I spent a childhood seeing the box at the video store and always going, “so the movie is that a shark is dangerous and might eat people? Why would I care about that?”
It’s kind of perfect. Also, big points for being the rare movie that has the instinct to simply drop the mic and go straight for the finish line the second that it can instead of lingering without good cause to tie up every loose end. I’m a sucker for a High Noon ending.
One of the streamers iirc Paramount+? has all of the MI movies to watch if you feel like ramping up to this one, fyi
You’re gonna need a bigger boat is also a great story
this is another one of those where they’re telling you right in movie poster, “This is a bad movie lol don’t bother.”
Why didn’t they just get a bigger boat? Kind of a plot hole there.
the only captain in town brave and salty enough to lead them out to catch Jaws just had the one boat
Guess he was a victim of his own hubris.
Quint destroying the ability to make outside contact when Brody tried to contact the Coast Guard for help was basically that moment that “work with what they have and either live or die” became non-negotiable.
To my understanding the mayor was compromised by the mafia in the book. I kind of like to treat that like it’s unspoken canon in the movie since the movie never explicates his idiocy or corruption. Granted that maybe the better and more grounded rendition would be the more garden-variety corruption that accompanies most politicians’ betrayal of the public’s best interests (on the take from business interests, etc).
Anyway, very few movies would have had the restraint to not devote a whole coda to the mayor’s story. And I could even understand that impulse. But I’m glad they didn’t bother; don’t think the juice would probably be worth the squeeze.
They just moved to Amazon Prime this month
They’re still sitting on Paramount too I think. But yeah, people with Prime and no Paramount can access them.