OTB#75: Jaws

Jaws. Steven Spielberg. 1975. ⚂

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

I assume this has been voted the 75th best movie of all time by directors is because of the technical qualities.

I mean, nobody can argue against how effective the “doon duun” scary music is. It’s beyond perfect. And everybody loves that effect where he pulls the camera away while zooming in.

But… but… He did film on location? Right? Why do all the street scenes look like they’re on set?

The plot is… stupid?

Roy Scheider acts like he’s in a made-for-TV movie? Right?

Is E.T. on this list, too? Gremlins 2?

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t get it. It’s a really scary horror movie, but there are many really scary horror movies.

Heh. Quentin Tarantino voted for this movie, and… the other ones aren’t familiar to me. Oh, the director of Dumb and Dumber voted for this movie.

OK, I may be somewhat unfair here. Sure, the movie is really boring when nobody’s in the water, but the scenes in the water are really tense and scary. Sure, the acting is atrocious, but it’s genre appropriate. There’s some good shots in here: The cinematography is more than adequate. So I think if I saw this in a different context I’d be enjoying this a lot more, but it just seems weak coming just after Un chien Andalou and Pierrot le fou.

And there’s this:

While in theaters, the film was said to have caused a single case of cinematic neurosis in a 17-year-old, female viewer. Cinematic neurosis is a condition in which viewers exhibit mental health disturbances, or a worsening of existing mental health disturbances, after viewing a film. The symptoms first presented as sleep disturbances and anxiety, but one day later the patient was screaming “Sharks! Sharks!” and experiencing convulsions.

Us humans certainly amuse ourselves.

ANYWAY, you could easily cut an hour of character development from this movie. The drunken scene on the boat seems interminable.

I’m still surprised at how many of these liqueurs haven’t gone off since I last used them, which was… two years ago? So far, I’ve only had to get rid of two of them, and one was an egg liqueur, so that’s not surprising. The Bikini Martini has blue curacao, which is also just 20%, but what’s not alcohol or water there is probably sugar, so perhaps it’s not surprising that no little critters (fungus, bacteria, amoebas) can live in there.

The cocktail’s OK.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#91: Un chien andalou

Un Chien Andalou. Luis Buñuel. 1929. ⚄

I have never seen this, but I’ve seen shots from every scene from this movie in various articles over the years. So I knew when to hold a pillow before my face, and I still haven’t seen That Scene.

This is Luis Buñuel’s famous exercise in épater la bourgeoisie, or course, but I’m surprised at how narrative it is. It’s fascinating.

I did not know that it was only just fifteen minutes long, so I barely had time to make a cocktail:

Slightly strange recipe: Sketcher’s Pet.

But it’s OK…

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#91: Chinatown

Chinatown. Roman Polanski. 1974. ⚄

I’ve seen this before, but I was like… twelve. The only thing I remember is the shocking ending.

This is like a proper mystery movie! With lots of detecting and conspiracies and stuff. I did not remember that at all. Very moody.

Nicholson is great, of course, as the somewhat embarrassing gum shoe. I’m amazed that Polanski spends virtually all the movie on the plot: This leaves very little time for “character development” (i.e., people sitting around moaning about their childhoods). Instead we get everything through the action… it’s so well done.

Love the expressive but almost unnoticeable cinematography.

Oh, the knife geek is Polanski himself? Well cast!

The movie is a bit gimmicky, I guess, but the ending still packs an incredible emotional wallop. The saddest ending in a movie ever in the history of movies. EVER!

Oops spoilers.

In the leftover booze series, we have the BBC. The Hennessy really isn’t very good, is it?

And… it tastes kinda harsh.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#91: La Maman et la putain

*gasp* Shoes in bed!

La maman et la putain. Jean Eustache. 1973. ⚄

All the movies on the list of the best movies (officially) are readily available… except this one. The only legit source I could find it from was this $80 VHS tape, and since my VHS player i… somewhere… I bought a bootleg version of it instead. On DVD, but it looks like it’s been sourced from the VHS.

I mean, a DVD version has been released, at least twice, but it’s nowhere to be found for sale. Very odd, or my Google-fu is broken.

ANYWAY.

The main character where is played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who looks very familiar indeed. But I didn’t know that he’d been involved with Nouvelle Vague movies since, well, before there were any. He was in The 400 Blows in 1959, when he was only 15. And then in basically all the Godard movies, and the Truffaut ones, and even in some of Rivette’s movies.

I initially had a bit of trouble connecting to the characters here… or even paying attention to the movie at all. Perhaps because of the crappy video quality? It’s easier to be rapt when looking at beautiful mise en scene. But I’m slowly being drawn in; getting fascinated by these mundane conversations. Because that’s what it seems like it’s going to be: Three and a half hours of people dating.

[time passes]

And then somebody reminded me that torrents exist, so after two hours I switched to a “HDTV” (i.e., 1.4K) version of this movie, and suddenly everything looks a lot prettier. It’s untitled, but there’s Subscene for that.

What would we do without pirates? Watch Netflix?

It’s odd that it’s not currently legally available:

The Mother and the Whore is considered Eustache’s masterpiece, and was called the best film of the 1970s by Cahiers du cinéma. It won the Grand Prix of the Jury and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. The film created a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival, as many critics saw the film as immoral and obscene or, in the words of the broadsheet Le Figaro, “an insult to the nation”, while Télé-7-Jours called it a “monument of boredom and a Himalaya of pretension”.

Or perhaps not.

I’m amazed that all the liqueurs for Widow’s Kiss hadn’t expired, but they tasted fine.

And so did this cocktail. Very boozy, though.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.