Random Notes Watching Jaws

-death of first girl seemed unrealistic for a shark attack but it works as a movie set piece

-nice withholding of information - when Sheriff arrives he's only responding to the girl's disappearance, but his deputy finds the body while Sheriff is present in the scene to give the needed emotional trauma to get our story going. a lot of bad scripts will "radio in" this moment instead...

-the psychological coherence of characters and dynamics are not entirely realistic...but work as melodrama. the sheriff slapped in front of the mayor by the 2nd victims mother - a powerful and needed emotional moment for the story. of course, it makes no sense. sheriff wanted to close beaches. mayor refused. but woman blames sheriff and he takes it.

-sheriff's flaw is often reported in screenwriting books as his fear of water, but this is not the case. his flaw is being "new" to the community and wanting to fit in. this is why he takes bad advice early on and listens to others, ie gets himself in trouble. 

-well handled exposition re the shark. show brody reading shark books (where he got them - who knows or cares?). later, he runs through ideas of territoriality, etc with dreyfuss - having already taught himself the theories. a lot of "expo" happens off screen. like they realize it's a shark attack and share this info with brody off screen - we just learn it through him typing up the police report

-a good number of "altman" esque filmmaking with multiple characters talking in the background while some type of action is foregrounded, but not heard completely. keeps the frame "full" and we take in quite a bit of information simultaneously. for instance, we track brody's son enjoying/liking the water while brody gets reports about a missing girl. we sense businessmen in the town worried for their livelihoods while at the same time brody is worried about the shark. 

-now they're out on the boat. a nice detail - they don't plan stay the night - but rather only do so because they got a single barrel in the shark and now feel as though they can track him. 

-in case you missed it, quint delivered the bomb. when i was younger, i thought they helped with the targeting or something but now i realized they literally were the ship that carried the bomb from the us to wherever the planes were parked. funny how one can hold onto a small misconception for decades. 

UPDATE:

-many filmmakers would've made the section of the film on the boat the third act, but in Jaws it's like a whole movie-within-a movie. i've heard it said before Jaws is two movies - a movie about a sheriff trying to keep the town safe and then a movie with 3 guys on a boat. i think that is right. 

-the streaming service flowed right into the option of watching The Meg, which I had never seen before. So to be a good citizen of the cinematic world, I gave the movie a shot. I should mention that I also watched Only Angels Have Wings this week, the old Howard Hawks film. Not a bad trio of films by way of comparison. All deal with characters interacting with physical tasks and vehicles - boats, submersibles, etc in Jaws/The Meg and airplanes in OAHW. Some overlapping themes of duty, dealing with death and grief, etc. But all three movies seems as if they are from entirely different civilizations. The understanding of human nature in Only Angels Have Wings is so far beyond The Meg, you would think some type of alien AI made the film. Maybe it did for all I know. Jaws is legit tho and reflects on an underlying humanity of the characters, but I feel like it ultimately is more of a movie than anything else. Like a human element of the story is subordinate to some other thing entirely - I guess what you might call cinema. It doesn't offend me, yet I somehow feel this is "less" that the moments in OAHW even though from a movie/entertainment perspective Jaws is more impressive. The Meg I turned off and was laughing out loud at the film. Let me say this as kindly as possible - this is movie made by and for retarded people. And when I say retarded, I mean not those with down syndrome, but type of person who was called retarded as an insult on the playground.