Jaws
“JAWS”
As I sit here wondering what to write about this week I chose the 1975 ground breaking directorial coming out party for Mr. Steven Spielberg JAWS!!! I am also choosing it because that’s what I will be playing at the drive-in this Thursday for the Throwback Thursday night movie. So if you've never seen it before then you gotta come see it on the “BIG” Screen. I wasn't so lucky with my first viewing. Although I was very familiar with Spielberg from the Indy flicks and Close Encounters of the Third Kind but Jaws remained unseen till I was around 13. It was summer we had one of those old “GIANT” satellites that GOT EVERYTHING. So one rainy summer day I looked in the TV Guide and saw Jaws was going to be on USA Network in an hour. Never seen it , done that’s what I'm watching.
Well as usual basic cable chopped it up and edited it so much that I thought well it was just OK. Then when I was 17 I got to watch the laser disc theatrical cut in the home theater of a friend. That was not the same movie I had watched 4 years earlier. And it sure looked better too. Home TV setups now are leaps above what we had back in the 80’s and 90’s that’s for sure. This time it stuck and I finally got all the hype. I remember reading a magazine article about how Spielberg originally envisioned seeing the shark a lot. Problems with the shark that the crew named “Bruce” caused him to shoot very little of the actual puppet and scraped most of that footage in the end. I believe this is what gives this movie all that it needs.
It gives it dread and the scariest kind the unseen dread. Had you seen the shark a lot it would not have been the same movie and much cheesier than the end product that we got. He took the thing about his shoot that was the source of his greatest frustration and made it work to his benefit resulting in a classic film. Of course the humans do great too. Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw put on a tour de force in their roles not to mention the great young Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper. For shark lovers this movie as the kids say SLAPS! For people scared of sharks it does its job. This film created the phrase BLOCK BUSTER and kicked off the summer movie arms race that most studios, theaters and movie watchers are still hoping for each summer season. Is going to the movies necessary no not at all but I can’t imagine a world where streaming movies to my phone or TV will ever be a better experience than a real theater be it Drive-In or not. 4.5 out of 5 Yellow Suckers
*This movie review was originally published in The Current River Observer as the River Reels article written by Jeffrey Riggs
