JAWS (1975) – Four decades later, it still has bite

The following is my entry in The Out to Sea Blogathon, being hosted by Debbie at her blog Moon in Gemini from March 6-8, 2020. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ critiques of a variety of water-based movies!

Three moronic sequels have not dimmed the power of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In fact, the sequels have only made the extraordinary qualities of the original more pointed. The shark was never the point; the characters were.

The movie’s plot sounds quite similar to the many rip-offs which followed. A beach is terrorized by a shark; the police chief (Roy Scheider) wants to close the beach down; but the tourist-conscious mayor (Murray Hamilton) won’t have it; tourists become so much appetizer while the mayor wallows in guilt; and finally, someone kills the sucker.

But again, it’s the way in which the shark is built up as a movie villain that had contemporary critics comparing Spielberg to Alfred Hitchcock. We never see the shark in full until movie’s end. More often, we get simply the shark’s actions. And they’re scary enough, as when the shark tears off the end of a pier where some bounty hunters were waiting to catch him.

Conflicting legends have grown up around the movie. One story has it that Spielberg, on the verge of establishing himself as a movie maverick, agreed to direct the movie only on the condition that the shark not been seen until the movie’s second half. The other story is that Spielberg intended to show the shark all along but had continual mechanical problems; as a result, the actors had plenty of time to improvise and get “into” their characters. Whatever the reason, the movie builds up as a model of suspense.

And as a result, we get to know what makes the three primary shark-hunters tick. There’s Police Chief Brody, whose first view of the shark inspires the classic understatement, “I think you’re gonna need a bigger boat.” There’s macho Captain Quint (Robert Shaw), whose hardening was partially the result of his being on-board a ship that sunk into shark-infested waters (which he describes in the movie’s famous monologue). And there’s oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), who quickly throws in the towel on Quint’s machismo contest by parodying it (when Quint crushes a steel can with his bare hand, Hooper crushes a styrofoam cup).

Ever since Spielberg hit it big 45 years (!) ago, Hollywood has gone mad with special-effects follies. But as moviegoers (and Spielberg) have always known, special effects are a success only if you care about the characters first. Jaws still serves a textbook example of special effects giving payoffs to well-developed characters.

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Spielberg!

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THE MASK OF ZORRO (1998) – They *can* make them like they used to

The following is my entry in The Costume Drama Blogathon, being hosted by Debbie at the blog Moon in Gemini from Sept. 6-8, 2019. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ tributes to a wide range of cinematic dresser-uppers!

1990’s.

These days, when filmmakers do ironic takes on old movies, you get the feeling they’re serving up spoofs because they don’t have the energy or nerve to do the real thing. But The Mask of Zorro is sincere about updating the old Saturday-matinee hero and, happily, does a darned good job of it.

At first, the storyline makes you fear the worst. The original Zorro (Anthony Hopkins), having been stripped of his wife and daughter by his evil adversary (Stuart Wilson, looking and acting like Mel Brooks on a tear), pulls a “Lethal Weapon” and decides he’s too old for this stuff. Twenty years later, Zorro Sr. recruits a down-on-his-luck bandito (Antonio Banderas) to revive the black-mask-superhero franchise.

But as this is a Steven Spielberg production, what The Mask of Zorro is really about is the art of filmmaking, and it shows what some imaginative people (director Martin Campbell among them) can do with a movie camera. There are some old-fashioned stunts and physical comedy that are carried off just about perfectly here. And usually, these shoot-the-works movies peter out just before the end credits, but this one has the most satisfying adventure-movie wrap-up I’ve seen in a long time.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Hopkins (as Zorro?!) or Banderas had this in them, but they play the most outrageous situations with perfectly straight faces, and it seems to invigorate them. (My only complaint with this gloriously fun movie is the unconvincing youthful look given to Hopkins at the movie’s start. I guess the filmmakers’ love of old-movie conventions extends to bad hair-dye jobs.)

And Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, as the love interest, might just have you swooning with delight (especially with a beaut of a sight gag in which Zeta-Jones is undressed by Banderas in a most unique way).

It’s hard to say how modern-day movie viewers jaded by toy soldiers and destructo-epics will respond to swashbucklers who are presented without a trace of irony. But The Mask of Zorro proves that heroes can still be served up straight, if it’s done with some wit and panache.

SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993) – Steven Spielberg’s sobering look at the Holocaust

The following is my entry in The World War II Blogathon, being co-hosted by Jay and Maddy, respectively, at their blogs Cinema Essentials and Maddy Loves Her Classic Films. Click on the above banner, and read bloggers’ takes on a wide range of WWII-themed movies!

Schindler’s List — a clear-eyed, flawless look at the Holocaust — is a movie filled with infinite paradoxes.

The most obvious paradox is its true story. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) was a German businessman who ran factories that made unusable products in order to save the lives of the factory workers — 1,100 Jews who otherwise would have been sent to Nazi death camps.

The movie shows the man but never quite explains him. Schindler is a rich womanizer — what has he to gain from this astounding gesture? Spielberg answers that question, not by delving into Schindler’s character, but by showing the atrocity going on around Schindler.

That atrocity is best personified by Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the Nazi who runs the Krakow ghetto as well as a Jewish death camp. Goeth is the absolute evil among evils, a man playing God in the most lethal sense.

Goeth’s atrocities range from petty to tragic. In one scene, he considers raping one of his Jewish servants, but then he verbally ponders how tainted she would seem to him after the rape, and so he merely slaps her. In another instance, a Jewish woman tries to warn him of a mistake in one of the death camp’s physical details. Goeth shoots the woman, then tells an underling to correct the mistake.

Schindler’s List soberly examines the ethics between these two extremes. The Nazis want to have somebody, anybody, come begging to them. They play into the hands of Schindler, who acts as though he’s using the war to his own ends when what he’s really doing is saving Jewish lives.

Then there are the movie’s commercial paradoxes. In 1993, nobody would have expected Steven Spielberg, known mostly for escapist fare, to have made such a haunting movie. It looks as though a camera was just set down in the middle of the Holocaust to soberly record its brutality. The movie runs over three hours and is not a minute too long.