In Contention

Tag: Jaws

  • In praise of the modern movie soundtrack

    I generally try to ignore film opinion pieces I think are fundamentally misguided — à chacun son goût and all that, plus the fact that fighting one mind is generally more trouble than it’s worth — but Ben Walsh’s idle article in The Independent today on the supposed demise of the movie soundtrack does such an absurd disservice to the current landscape of film music that it can’t pass without objection.

    Walsh’s standpoint is a dully nostalgic one: movie scores were so much more memorable in the old days, when greats like John Williams, Ennio Morricone and Danny Elfman (who are all dead, apparently) conjured whistle-ready themes by the dozen, while scores today “seem so completely unmemorable” by comparison.

    His pool of case studies for this assertion is a shallow one — he speaks mainly of the recent Oscar winners by Best Picture, Original Score and Original Song, oddly conflating the last two categories as if the two disciplines are somehow comparable — and even through that narrow prism, his preferences are hard to justify.

    (more…)

  • ‘Dark Knight Rises’ trailer attached to final ‘Harry Potter’

    Nothing much going on today, so why not toss up a good ole’ fashioned SEO-baiting post? Those of you planning to take in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” next weekend (which I imagine is most of you), you’ll be delighted to know that, according to Superhero Hype, Warner Bros. will attach the first teaser trailer for Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” to prints of the film. Enjoy.

    Also hitting next weekend, the story says, will be the teaser poster. I don’t remember there being any teaser posters for “Batman Begins” (unless I’m mistaken), but “The Dark Knight” had that face-paint-on-a-brick-wall thing and the frosted glass Joker image. This could be where they tease the inclusion of Catwoman (and maybe a catch phrase a la “Why So Serious?”). Guessing.

    I had an exchange with a friend recently regarding the anticipation for this film. He argued that it’s at a higher fever pitch than any film since “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” but I don’t feel that way. Sure, it’s huge amongst the geek set (given the blurred footage of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING that floated around two weeks ago). But I still think “Avatar” was a bigger deal. The media (not just online choir-preaching) was pushing the issue on that one pretty hard.

    (more…)

  • “I got beaten out by Fellini!”

    Chad passed this along.  I actually hadn’t seen it in a while.  I wonder if Nolan’s support system blew their stack a la this crowd:

  • 35 years later…

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Oscar nominee fields

    Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's ListIn exactly one week’s time, we’ll have a brand new list of Oscar nominations to pore over, pick apart and eventually file away in our subconscious with the other 81 editions of this annual collective. For Oscar geeks, nomination day is in many ways more exciting than the ceremony itself, celebrating a broader spectrum of work and throwing up far more surprises along the way.

    For all that, once the winners are announced, the nomination list as a whole tends to be disregarded, returned to only by trivia buffs and the geekiest of Oscar geeks. (Guilty on both counts.) And that’s shame, because a field of five nominees can often be more illuminating viewed collectively than even the worthiest of individual champions.

    Today’s list, then, is devoted to that most elusive of Oscar holy grails: the perfect nominee field.

    Yes, more often than not, the Academy will nominate several notable achievements in a single category. But rarer than hen’s teeth are the robust Oscar categories that feature a full house of five outstanding nominees, five contenders that would all be worthy of a win in any other year. No unremarkable coaster nominees sliding in on the coattails of a popular picture. No bad films with an expensively studio-bought  nominations. No filler. No fat. Just five superb achievements.

    (more…)

  • Counting to ten

    Since the Academy announced the new ten-lane track for the Best Picture race, any number of bloggers have projected which extra films might have made the cut under this format in the last few years, a process that, for many, retrospectively hands hypothetical nods to everything from “Doubt” to “Memoirs of a Geisha” to “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

    It’s a process that is as dispiriting as it is occasionally heartening, but so far there hasn’t been much informed analysis of how the Academy’s weighted balloting system might affect the lower reaches of the list. (I must wonder, for example, whether a “Geisha” had enough number-one votes to even crack a list of ten — the new format will certainly test the remaining power of the studio system.)

    Anne Thompson, however, offers by far the most interesting backward-glancing “what-if” piece I’ve yet read, in which an unnamed (but clearly authoritative) film historian digs a little further back to consider what a ten-nominee Best Picture category might have looked like in the years from 1967 to 1979.

    (more…)

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 movies I watched with Dad

    (from left) Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red OctoberIn case you’re like me and you happen to forget these things throughout the year, let today’s edition of The Lists serve as a reminder: Father’s Day is this weekend!

    With that in mind, and as a personal tribute of sorts to my pops, who turns 56 today in addition to celebrating his 28th Father’s Day on Sunday, I thought I’d offer up a rundown of the films that remind me of those days in front of the big console television growing up back east.

    My personal movie awakening came in the mid-1990s, when films like Michael Mann’s “Heat” and Bryan Singer’s “The Usual Suspects” made me realize I wanted to have a hand in this crazy business for life.  But I can’t ignore the impact decades of film product had on my youth in the form of my father’s viewing habits.  I didn’t like every film my Dad loved.  But somehow, his taste frequently seemed to either correspond with my own or correspond with how it would eventually evolve.

    There are a number of films that didn’t make the collective that deserve some measure of notice, despite not having a particular impact.  Peter Hyams’s “Capricorn One” comes to mind, for instance, or horror flicks like William Girdler’s “The Manitou” and Stan Winston’s “Pumpkinhead.”  Not to mention more recent efforts like George Tillman Jr.’s “Men of Honor.”  And even though I remember watching “The Godfather” with Dad (and Mom, actually) as a kid, I don’t immediately connect the two when I consider Francis Coppola’s film today.

    The order of the list is a mish-mash of criteria.  I wouldn’t say it’s tiered by quality so much as by how much the films remind me of the old man (though quality certainly figures in here and there).  Mostly, this is just a tip of the hat to one guy’s movie tastes that galvanized his son in some way.  I hope you enjoy.

    (more…)

  • Your ranked list of the 10 most influential films of all time

    Citizen KaneAnd with that, our poll series comes to a screeching halt.  I’ve already offered some thoughts on how all of this turned out.  I hope readers unfamiliar with some of the films I’ve been harping on will take that to heart and at least seek them out.  You owe it to yourself as a film lover, believe you me.

    Here is your ranked list.  For background on all of these shenanigans, click here.  I want to thank everyone who participated in the polls and made this a real community effort.

    1. “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles, 1941)
    2. “Star Wars” (George Lucas, 1977)
    3. “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
    4. “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
    5. “The Wizard of Oz” (Victor Fleming, 1939)
    6. “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
    7. “Jaws” (Steven Spielberg, 1975)
    8. “Pulp Fiction” (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
    9. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (David Hand, 1937)
    10. “Toy Story” (John Lasseter, 1995)

    Honorable mention: “Annie Hall,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Battleship Potemkin,” “The Birth of a Nation,” “Casablanca,” “The Godfather Part II,” “Gone with the Wind,” “The Matrix,” “Metropolis” and “Rashomon”

    One of these days I’ll cook up my own list.  Until then, once again, thanks for participating.

  • On TCM now…

    Richard Schickel’s documentary “Spielberg on Spielberg.”  Just finished talking about “Duel” (what I maintain to be a top five Spielberg effort to this day) and “Jaws.”  Ths is critical viewing to anyone interested in filmmaking.  It’s a treat to hear the director talking at length about his own work.  This is a guy who has never provided a director’s commentary track for a DVD release, so it’s a rarer treat than you’d expect.

    Speaking of “Jaws” (a personal all-time top 20er and a finalist in our influential films poll), I’ve always laughed out loud at Roy Scheider’s reaction to first seeing the shark.  You know it well, the “chum” scene.  That bolt-upright snap of his, cigarette sticking out, that unmistakable “holy shit” look of shock.  I don’t know, cracks me up every time.

  • POLL: the most influential films of all time, round one, part six

    Alright, we’re at the end of round one with a final set of 10 films.  For background on this series, click here.

    By the way, “Jaws,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Toy Story” were the survivors from the last round.  Have your say in the left sidebar by picking up to three films to move on and join the 17 waiting the next round!

  • TCM’s top 15 most influential classic movies

    MetropolisWell, here’s something I guess.  Rope of Silicon points us to TCM’s list of the top 15 most influential “classic” films of all time.  I actually started working up such a list for the site a while back but abandoned it for whatever reason.  It was going to include all comers, though, not just classic films.  They seem to be listed in chronological order over at TCM.com.  The 15:

    “The Birth of a Nation” (1915)
    “Battleship Potemkin” (1925)
    “Metropolis” (1927)
    “42nd Street” (1933)
    “It Happened One Night” (1934)
    “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937)
    “Gone with the Wind” (1939)
    “Stagecoach” (1939)
    “Citizen Kane” (1941)
    “The Bicycle Thief” (1947)
    “Rashomon” (1950)
    “The Searchers” (1956)
    “Breathless” (1959)
    “Psycho” (1960)
    “Star Wars” (1977)

    My list certainly included most of those, which are by and large hard to argue with.  “Birth,” “Battleship,” “Metropolis,” “Night,” “Snow White,” “Wind,” “Kane” and “Star Wars” were definitely included in my tally.  If we were to extend it beyond the “classic” realm, I think we’d have to include “Jurassic Park” and the “Lord of the Rings” franchise.  “Toy Story” would have to have a secure place, while “Pulp Fiction” obviously sparked a revolution some would argue had roots in “sex, lies and videotape” (also a contender for an “all-time” list).

    Since TCM’s idea of “classic” obviously stretches into the late 1970s, I think it’s rather foolish to leave off “Jaws” and/or “The Godfather” considering what they meant to big business theatrical revenue before “Star Wars” came along.  And going way back, “The Great Train Robbery” had people running from the theater screaming after the final image of a bandit firing his gun at the camera.  There’s something to be said for one of the first films to enthrall like that.

    And what about “The Jazz Singer?”  How do you leave that title off a list of “classic” cinema?  I guess it had to be narrowed to 15 but there are a couple of films on that list that could have been bumped, I think.

    Let’s put it to the readership.  Assuming an “all-time” list rather than limiting it to the classics, what would you say have been the most influential films?  I could make a mean case for “Die Hard,” but I’ll anxiously await your input.  Rattle off your lists and maybe we’ll settle things with a series of polls.

  • THE LISTS: In Contention’s top 20 horror films of all time

    228 Days LaterYes, how trite.  Another list of the “best” horror films of all time.  But this really is the most subjective of genres, is it not?  What is scary to us all has slipped out of the realm of the universal and become much more of a personal thing.

    Certain films are inarguable, as our list certainly reflects here and there.  But across the landscape of horror filmmaking, you find perhaps the broadest range of creativity in the medium.  So it goes without saying that a list such as this ought to be varied.

    Unlike the other lists we’ve featured here at In Contention, our rundown of the 20 best horror films of all time did not spring from the mind of this writer or that, but is instead representative of the collective.  We’ve polled each of our six contributors to ascertain their high marks in the genre and, through a complicated process of tabulation that involved thorough computation, lots of late nights and perhaps an abacus as well, the list was whittled down to the 20 films you see here.

    There are mainstays aplenty, but we think you’ll be surprised by a few of the entries.  Each of us hold very different opinions, as should be expected when you get a southerner L.A. transplant, an Arkansas law professor, two Toronto natives 20 years apart in age, a north easterner who recently made the trek out west and a humble Brit.

    We hope you enjoy the list.

    (more…)

  • Spielberg and blockbusters

    Can he do it? After becoming (in his own eyes) a serious filmmaker with “Schindler’s List,” “Amistad,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “A.I.” and “Munich,” is Steven Spielberg able to re-create the magic he almost always brought to his pure entertainment blockbusters?

    It takes a look at his journey as an artist to even attempt a reasoned understanding of such a question.

    On one hand, I argue that he was always a brilliant director, “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” all great examples of his artistry, yet he himself was never satisfied by the reaction to those films by the Academy. It is well documented that Spielberg coveted acceptance in the film community, seeing the Oscar for Best Director as the ultimate acceptance from Hollywood. Snubbed for “Jaws” in 1975, he behaved like a petulant child as live cameras caught it all on film, invited in to see his reaction when he was nominated…but — he wasn’t.

    (more…)