The original Jaws is a stone-cold classic. Its director, some guy named Steven Spielberg who probably has a promising career ahead of him, expertly paced the original summer blockbuster, drew nuanced performances from Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, and had the good sense to show as little of the titular shark as possible, allowing dread to build and imaginations to run wild.
Let’s start from a generally uncontroversial place: The Oscars are nonsense. Just utter bullshit. We are idiots for paying a single moment of attention to them.
And yet. Like many goofballs, I can’t turn away. It’s like playing craps in one of the less reputable Vegas casinos, in downtown rather than on the Strip.
As I catch up on movies from the last year that I missed in theaters, it’s increasingly clear that all the laments about 2014 being a bad one for film are total nonsense.
The list of excellent movies, or at least the one I’m working on, keeps growing: leaving aside the quiet awards juggernaut of Boyhood (all deserved), that list already includes the tense revelations of Blue Ruin and Calvary, James Gray’s monumental The Immigrant, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon-noir Inherent Vice … not to mention Ida, Under The Skin, Wetlands, Obvious Child, Noah, and We Are The Best!
It’s awards season, and there’s no shortage of commentary. I might chime in myself in a few weeks. (Spoilers: Boyhood, Ida, The Immigrant, Under The Skin, and Noah would win all the things if it were up to me, and Uma Thurman would get a best Supporting Actress nod for Nymphomaniac Vol 1 — it is not, it turns out, up to me.)