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A Whale of a Tale., 13 May 2009

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Da... dun....

Da-dun...

Dun-dun Dun-dun Dun-dun Dun-dun Dun-dun - toodle-oooo (those are the French horns)...

When Steven Spielberg first heard John Williams's simple, ominous JAWS theme, he apparently thought it was a joke. Now who's laughing?

They just don't make 'em like this anymore. Matter of fact, even this film's director, Mr. Household-Name himself, Steven Spielberg, don't make 'em like this anymore. JAWS put Spielberg into the A-Plus List. He has been trying to capture the natural ease and gutshock power of JAWS ever since.

Amity Island - a great place to get eaten. A white pointer shark is terrorizing beach vacationers and Sheriff Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) must battle the tourist-minded Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) to keep the beaches closed. Death in the water and death upon land (for the tourist trade) forces the town to employ a grizzled seadog, Quint (Robert Shaw), a funky marine biologist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and aquaphobic Brody to hunt the Great White down.

I still cannot explain why Method acting in the 70s was so much better overall than it is in the late 2000s. Look at Brody interacting with his kids (the same interaction is captured by Spielberg in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, 1977); look at the extras, not behaving like they're one step closer to a SAG card, but behaving like hick islanders without a camera filming them; look at the snide asides between the excitable Dreyfuss, the intolerant Shaw, and the frustrated Schieder, inhabiting their characters like scales on fish.

Movie deviates from Peter Benchley's book of the same name. In the book, Hooper has an affair with Brody's wife, the Brodys' class issues with the upper-class island community are prevalent, Mayor Vaughn is in deep with the Mob, and Quint dies when a rope lashed to his leg drags him under with the shark (Benchley trying for an Ahab moment?).

TV writer Carl Gottlieb was brought in to tighten Benchley's screenplay (of which many drafts were rejected, according to IMDb), restructuring the longwinded book into the compelling movie we love and fear.

In 1975, JAWS was not only the highest grossing film of all time (until STAR WARS would wrench that title from its fins in 1977), the head-game impact it made on the world depleted beach trade in the mid-70s; people stopped swimming for fear of sharks; untold shark television specials and documentaries were greenlighted, not to mention Peter Benchley's average novel going "superbestseller" (was that before or after JAWS went supernova?).

All on accounta Bruce - the nickname given to Spielberg's temperamental mechanical shark and the unworldliness of his dead, dead eyes and razorkill jaws.

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