I don't know if anyone else experiences this, but I tend to feel the sting of the passage of time more through the birthdays of others and certain anniversaries. It hasn't always been this way; this probably started when I hit my fifties. It was then that my younger (three years) sister's birthdays started making me feel older than mine did.
It hit me again on Tuesday afternoon when I read that "Jaws" had hit the half-century mark.
Last Independence Day, I had a few extra hours on my hands and decided to watch a movie, which isn't my usual modus operandi. Normally, I would take forever to decide what to watch, especially if I was searching for something newer. It was, however, the 4th of July, and the choice was beyond obvious: I was watching "Jaws." It never gets old, that first time we hear the music, does it?
Whenever I haven't seen the movie in a few years, I chuckle at just how '70s-awful so much of the acting in it is. Not the main characters, of course, but pretty much everyone else in the film. OK, the woman who played Chief Brody's wife was okay. We were all very fortunate that so much of the movie took place on the boat with the three principal characters, though.
A Deadline article about the 50th anniversary sums up the impact on moviegoing history that "Jaws" had:
On its 50th anniversary, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws can claim to be the most disruptive film of the last half-century, maybe even ever. While predecessors like The Godfather and The Exorcist drew theater lines around the block through word-of-mouth, Jaws was the one for which the term summer blockbuster was coined. Opening on a then-unheard-of 409 screens, the film caught the zeitgeist in an unprecedented manner, helped by marketing techniques that would center escapism as a staple of the summer movie season.
All of that, and it put Steven Spielberg on the map.
The movies could desperately use a return to escapism, and not just for the summer months. For far too long, filmmakers have been churning out ever more depressing examinations of real life. That's why so many recent Oscar-nominated films have only been seen by members of the Academy.
Sometimes, all we need is to have the crap scared out of us by a monstrous fish for three hours. Please pass the popcorn before it comes back.
Click the button below to get the Morning Briefing emailed to you every weekday. Have your coffee with me, people. It's free and it supports conservative media!
