These are the moments when I am glad this blog is my baby. I can do whatever I want with my baby. So from time to time, I will need to gravitate away from the norm and do something ridiculous. Today is one of those days. I need to talk about sharks, because I love them. Yes, I love sharks… not as much as I love dinosaurs, though.
Specifically, I love to watch people be eaten and maimed by these wonderful friends of mine (though, all eating and maiming of humans on screen is ok by me). I thought a light overview of my interest was in order and hopefully would brighten up your day and bring cheer into your life, as thankfully, you are not being eaten… at the moment.
As opposed to working my way up to dinosaurs, let’s just begin with them, and then do a few minutes on my smaller friends. I LOVE DINOSAURS, DUDE. I always have. I used to request frequent visits to the Boston Museum of Science in order to marvel at what we can guess was a life-size replica of a Tyrannosaurs Rex.
That is neither here nor there, however; when you are talking about dinosaurs, there really aren’t too many places to turn for production value and enjoyment. There is certainly a slew of old Godzilla movies out there, as well as a great selection of claymation films from back in the day and a billion kids movies that I don’t care about, but thoroughly entertaining movies? Few and far between.
Here is a halfway decent claymation one from a million years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYHuJayozus
There is no denying it, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are my go-to guys for dinosaurs. Jackson just briefly in King King, but hey it was good enough that it is getting a mention. Jurassic Park is clutch in my world. I know the stories are crap and they definitely got worse as they went on, but you see, I am not watching Jurassic Park for the story. I do not care if Jeff Goldblum is a good actor (he isn’t). I am not watching to see the on-again, off-again romance between Sam Neill and Laura Dern, the wit of Samuel Jackson, or the plight of William H. Macy and Tia Leoni. None of it matters to me at all. You know what does matter to me? THEM ALL GETTING EATEN (noneofthemgeteatendontworry).
In any case, lots of other people get eaten, and it’s awesome. Tons of running, screaming, crashing your car into walls, obvious plot holes everywhere and dinosaurs that most scientists agree “didn’t look like that.” I love it!
Let’s watch this guy get eaten, shall we?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Co3A3fLBo
In editing this piece, my good friend Beth pointed out that she couldn’t quite see how I liked dinosaurs more than our other topic, and that it might be useful to wax poetic about them a little bit more.
I think it’s time to talk about RAPTORS a little bit. Totally sophisticated awesome bringers of pain. A pack of raptors make wild wolves look like All Dogs Go to Heaven. As stated plainly in Jurassic Park, if it were not for a meteor destroying most of life on earth, it would have been raptors, not humans that proved dominant on this world. They just liked to kill with no rhyme or reason (except for all the EATING).
Most Paleontologists (spelled it right in one try) agree that the raptors in Jurassic Park didn’t look anything like in real life, that probably they were covered with feathers, not all leathery and scary looking. But you know what? Who gives a crap. They were awesome. I may have to quit my job and go run around in the jungle for a few months now. Ok maybe not.
Alright. So now…. moving on.
I love sharks too, let’s talk about them now. For me, this is a whole different kind of awesome because… these things are around right now, and big things really happen on occasion. Certainly none of the sharks we see in movies are really a good representation of these real life predators, but that matters not, because every year… PEOPLE GET EATEN BY SHARKS.
There are plenty of films, good and bad out there, about sharks eating people and just being pretty awesome killing machines in general. I gotta say, too: though I want to try and avoid talking to much about television programs on The Big Brown Chair, that Discovery Channel Shark Week is pretty stellar. A few specific films I think are really entertaining are Deep Blue Sea, Open Water, and a documentary from 2007 called Ocean of Fear: Worst Shark Attack Ever.
This all out on the table, there is in fact no debate whatsoever (for me and really for most people out there with an opinion) that the best shark movie of all time is very obvious.
Jaws came out in 1975 and changed cinema (and swimming, ha) forever. My mother instituted a important stance on Jaws very early on for me, and without question helped develop my love for cinema. The rule was this: Jaws is the best movie in the history of the world, and we will watch it as frequently as possible. I could probably recite the lines top to bottom, and likely is in contention for movie I have seen the most times in all of my life.
Jaws is widely thought of as the greatest horror movie every made (though that’s a bit ridiculous). It is standard for something made these days, even though the acting in it from Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Schnieder, and Robert Shaw was way above par for a horror movie. Things like this didn’t exist as much in 1975. The vision of a young Steven Spielberg really jumped off of the screen and took the whole country by storm.
I mean ok, enough mushy talk… have you seen this movie or what? The shark is as big as a house, totally ridiculous, eating boats and just the scariest thing in your whole life. It’s awesome!!! Not for nothing, either, but they made 37 terrible sequels too, because they knew they could always make money when sharks started eating people. I have a friend who to this day will not go into the ocean. You know why? SHARKS THAT’S WHY!
So in any case, I appreciate prehistoric monsters and their descendants. The thought of my fellow mouth-breathers fighting for their lives and losing brings an odd satisfaction to my sensibilities. I am not hoping for any shark or dinosaur-induced deaths in real life, but when it is fictional and on the big screen… Sign Me Up!
