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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   633 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 1, 2026

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Finished watching Jaws on Netflix before it went off the air. I found it disappointing, which is surprising considering its reputation (the first summer blockbuster, recommended by both Roger Ebert and Critical Drinker, etc.)

I think the problem is that I couldn't connect to the characters. Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water). Quint has potential, but in the end he comes across more as a greedy asshole than as a truly passionate shark hunter. And the research dude is just there. I don't care what happens to these people; none of them are awesome enough to keep my interest. Combine that with the slow pacing (the shark is famously not shown until the final act to build suspense) and I was left looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie would be.

It only really gets good in the last twenty minutes when they are directly battling the shark, and by then it is too late.

Chief is too much of a coward, both morally (fails to stand up to the Mayor) and physically (afraid of water).

Being afraid of water but working in a coastal town is funny, though. And the kind of tough choices you might have to make in the real world: if the best (or only) job you can get is a tourist town by the sea, then that's the one you take. Same with standing up to the mayor: how does he do that and not blow up his career? If the shark isn't a real danger, he looks like a fool who created a panic for nothing. If he scares everyone off, then the summer business that the town relies on dries up and people are still going to blame him when their businesses go bust because now, not only did they lose out on this year's revenue, the town has a reputation that scares off people next year and the year after. If nobody dies, then everyone is going to go "see, there was no danger in the first place".

It's not realism, but it's realistic: the shark hunter is an asshole, but that's why he's the only guy willing to take on the job. The marine researcher can only do so much, and his main contribution is "well research says sharks do X and not Y". The chief is trying to meet the demands of the job, the town, and the danger, and juggle it all so he can come out at the end with some career left.

Being afraid of water but working in a coastal town is funny, though. And the kind of tough choices you might have to make in the real world: if the best (or only) job you can get is a tourist town by the sea, then that's the one you take.

I wonder sometimes about all the people who got impressed into service aboard naval vessels who couldn't even swim, and what that must have been like. But also, why would you not, at that point, learn to swim‽

If you went over the side it'd only delay the inevitable.

Would being able to swim even save a sailor if he were washed overboard in a storm? I feel doubtful.

I expect naval vessels didn't have swimming pools in those days.

Yeah, but I imagine they spent a significant amount of time in ports or around beaches. When the ship is anchored for a foreseeable amount of time, they would have had a chance to learn it.

I know that since most didn't learn it that it probably somehow made sense to them not to learn it anyway, but it's hard to explain from my perspective too. I learned as a kid and it felt pretty much effortless, but maybe it's harder for an adult to learn it. And it's not like it's very likely to save your life; from their point of view, it's likely if you fell in the drink it was in a situation where swimming wouldn't help much (ship just got sank, big storm). Maybe it'd mean additional dangerous tasks might be asked of you if your superiors find out you can swim.

Very interesting. I watch it every year. There are to my mind some absolutely brilliantly constructed scenes. When Alex Kintner gets eaten, that whole set-up prior (the sounds of the beach radios disappear as the camera goes out to Alex's distance, returns when the camera is back on the beach, etc ) is so well done. The whole movie is so full of granular detail of this sort that when I hear people say they dislike it I wonder if either they're watching a different film or they are used to more, I don't know, motion or action. I love JAWS , almost as much as I love Close Encounters. The same things are happening in that film. The cuts, the shot setups, it's just so rich. If you didn't like the JAWS film characters you should definitely avoid reading the novel.

I'm not saying you're wrong to dislike these films, but to me they're both eminently rewatchable.

I found myself similarly disappointed. Although my impression was just that it was poorly made. In the same way that CGI or fight choreography from old films is just bad compared to modern films, Jaws felt sloppy and amateurish.

Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved. Compare the fight scenes in Enter the Dragon to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; or the battle scenes in Zulu to Saving Private Ryan. Incomparable.

I'd put "The Longest Day" ahead of "Saving Private Ryan" as a D-Day war movie, personally. And Kelly's Heroes remains one of the great comedies/heist films of all time.

Honestly, I struggle to watch films made before the 1980-90s. Comedies tend not to age well for reasons of cultural change (with notable exceptions, e.g. the Python films or Airplane!) and dramas need to have a really compelling script to allow me to forgive the fact that filmmaking was just worse back then. Maybe part of it may be my ruined modern attention span, but I think filmmaking has genuinely improved.

For me, I think this mostly just applies to movies made in the late 60s-70s. It's dated now, but I find that a lot of movies before that period don't have the same problem with filmmaking that the 1970s stuff did - for example Hitchcock's oeuvre for the most part feels like the work of an extremely competent and confident filmmaker with a large amount of control over the medium. Even as late as 1966, I find many films to be eminently watchable (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for example).

It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed off as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch. Say what you want about the studio control of the Golden Age and how it Stifled Revolutionaries, I think that era reined in the worst impulses of auteurs and forced them to become a bit more economical and deliberate with their filmmaking.

That being said, nothing is worse than the overly-saturated, uniformly-lit, plastic CGI look that modern Hollywood specialises in.

It was when New Hollywood started really exploding in popularity that I truly find films start appearing very overly indulgent; apart from a select few movies that are classics, there's an almost intolerable amount of sloppy poorly-framed low-budget guerrilla cinematography passed off as grittiness, horrible audio mixing that renders the voices barely audible, bloated pacing that includes extraneous shots of lazy improvisation and oceans of irrelevant dialogue that are kept for "authenticity's sake", and other such elements that make them difficult to watch.

What are some of the offending films you have in mind here?

In spite of its critical and commercial success I think The French Connection (1971) epitomises a bunch of the worst tendencies of film of this era, I have never been able to get into it. The extremely shaky, low-quality and chaotic filmography is relentless, and gets tiring to look at after five minutes; in similar fashion the audio is very crunchy. Pacing and plot-wise, it's an otherwise uneventful police procedural that's often disjointed, drags unnecessarily and is saved every now and then by brief spurts of action (I did not actually make it to the famous car chase scene, because I was so underwhelmed by the rest of it). I'm sure this film has its lovers here, but so much of the filming and pacing felt so undercurated that it came off almost like a B-movie at some points.

You can even see some of these tendencies show up in blockbuster crowdpleasers of the era like The Sting (1973). It's not nearly as bad technically and definitely is paced far better, costuming and set dressing is nice, but there's a sort of 1970s stink to it still: it generally feels like it lacks a huge amount of intentionality in the staging department, it's packed full of dialogue that - in its attempts to be authentic/gritty - falls into a middle ground that's neither realistic enough to be believable or dramatic enough to be charming, and just feels like a rather simple caper movie that moves a good bit slower than it should. I am sure time has hurt both of these movies, and I am sure someone else here enjoys these for the very reasons I don't. But referring back to my previous example of Hitchcock, Psycho is old and cheesy as hell, and yet I still find myself thinking "That's some nice framing and presentation" at multiple points during the film (e.g. the shot of the water swirling down the shower drain, which fades into Marion's lifeless eye staring at the viewer while the camera twirls). Also, the man knew how to fucking block a scene. 1970s movies, on the other hand, are just lacking in this same kind of deliberateness.

It's obvious that films of the era were trying to incorporate more subversive elements and experiment with innovative approaches to filmmaking. But there's a fundamental identity crisis at its core, where much of it maintains the quality of trying to be viscerally crowdpleasing while at the same time incorporating some superficial aspects of art cinema into it (slow pacing, lingering shots focusing on small details, irresolution and nonlinearity) without the precise, fine-tuned control and stubborn commitment to a deeply individual aesthetic vision that makes art cinema fascinating even if you end up bouncing off the film. A lot of it is just a very unhappy middle ground for me.

I think lots of modern viewers have trouble with how non-optimized older movies are, and it's not necessarily an attention span thing. Almost every scene or bit of dialog in modern movies is Doing Something or Establishing Something. There's very little fat. Many older movies have stretches that are doing nothing but hanging out with a character or doing some non-essential worldbuilding or spending time on a sideplot that ultimately goes nowhere. This was taken to extreme lengths at times (like The Deer Hunter or Heaven's Gate) but many 60s-70s films have stuff like this. This is probably not applicable to you if you enjoy films like Psycho or The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

I'd be curious what you thought of any Robert Altman movies you've seen. His audio mixing is atrocious and his pacing is all over the place, but it's usually intentional. His framing, presentation, and scenes can all be top-notch.

I've always found The Sting to be stuffy and airless. It's a big studio crowd-pleaser that sanded off too many rough edges to hit the mass-market middle ground (and box office receipts show they nailed it). Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid had amazing scenery, great cinematography, a script by William Goldman, and the ridiculous chemistry of Newman and Redford, whereas The Sting was trying to get by on the latter. I agree with the 70s stink on that one.

There are a number of cop movies from the 60s-70s that suffer from "one-hour police procedural stretched into 2 hours." Bullitt is the prime example. I don't think I'd say French Connection is like that, but maybe it feels that way when the first half-hour of a 1:44 movie is a bunch of stuff establishing what kind of person and cop Hackman's character is.

I've always found The Sting to be stuffy and airless. It's a big studio crowd-pleaser that sanded off too many rough edges to hit the mass-market middle ground (and box office receipts show they nailed it).

Maybe I am the mass market moddle ground, but I loved it. It's probably got some of my favorite twists, and the con scenes are pulled off very well.

I actually agree about The French Connection. The wife and I couldn't get past about 30 minutes of it since there was basically nothing going on.

There's definitely some gems among 70s films nevertheless, like The Conversation which feels excellently paced and realistically characterized.

As a confirmed Breaking Bad hater, I have read the AV Club's "The case against Breaking Bad" article many times, as it articulated almost everything that I disliked about the show, including its cinematography. Even fans of the show have acknowledged how silly the "Mexico is yellow" thing is, but this was the only source I've seen that criticised the overuse of jitter cam, something I found really annoying and distracting:

But even in the look of the show, clichés abound. In Breaking Bad, the sky over Mexico is always yellow. Much of the show, including its quietest moments, is afflicted with an unmotivated camera shudder that will date the show as badly as the excessive use of zooms dates many films from the early '70s.

Once this was pointed out to me it became hard to unsee. Last October I compiled a list of "classic" horror films I'd never got around to seeing, including Black Christmas. I did enjoy it (if for no other reason than my enormous crush on the young Olivia Hussey – my word, just look at her), but that specific thing where a character delivers a line of dialogue accompanied by an extremely slow zoom-in on their face is such a 70s trope, and almost always comes off as incredibly corny and immersion-breaking. You rarely see it in movies made before or after the 70s.

Check out a couple of clips of The Shield on Youtube for the most relentless and egregious use of camera movement. It's almost unwatchable.

I will never understand people who say that Nolan is a competent director of action films. Nauseating disorientation =/= excitement. Paul Greengrass has a lot to answer for.

The action parts of Nolan's films are by far the worst parts. The snow battle scene in Inception drags the film to a total halt. I was bored senseless during the tunnel/truck chase scene in The Dark Knight. It's almost impressive how his action scenes can be so dull.

Don't get me started on the zoom-ins of the 70s, one of the corniest filmmaking devices employed in that era. Jittery handheld style is all over many films of that era as well, for what it's worth, especially those who wanted to emulate the new wave feel.

I liked Breaking Bad enough but the cinematography was not the strong point. Some of the filmography on Gilligan's new project Pluribus possibly surpasses the lows of Breaking Bad, this scene in particular where Carol is on the rooftop reminds me of The Room; the green screen is executed so sloppily that Carol outright does not have a shadow. Then there is this, which is somehow even worse. The per episode budget was $15 million.

Some of the filmography on Gilligan's new project Pluribus possibly surpasses the lows of Breaking Bad, this scene in particular where Carol is on the rooftop reminds me of The Room; the green screen is executed so sloppily that Carol outright does not have a shadow. Then there is this, which is somehow even worse.

Jesus Christ, you weren't kidding. I have seen AI slop which looked more convincing than the latter clip.

Yeah, I saw it for the first time a few years ago and felt rather underwhelmed. If compiling a list of my Spielberg films it certainly wouldn't crack the top five. (I did enjoy it more than Close Encounters, though.) Definitely a film which fell victim to the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" effect, where it's hard for modern viewers to appreciate how inventive it must have seemed on release.

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