robert shaw Tagged Articles at Cinematical

"Aargh!" "Ahoy, matey!" "Shiver me timbers!" OK, that's it, I'm out of buccaneer bon mots, which are pretty much essential in order to honor Talk Like a Pirate Day, celebrated annually on September 19. And even those pirate sayings are ones I took from an article on the event in Los Angeles Times, which credits John "OI' Chumbucket" Bauer and Mark "Cap'n Slappy" Summers for igniting the tradition years ago.

When it comes to movies, the Pirates of the Caribbean series comes trippingly to mind, especially since Disney just announced that Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides will be coming ashore in Summer 2011, with Johnny Depp returning as Jack Sparrow. But it's pretty tough to talk like Johnny Depp -- believe me, I've tried, and gotten my face slapped as a result -- so what other movie pirates can we safely imitate? Here's a quick list:

• Errol Flynn. I'm working on my Australian accent, by way of England, and I think I've got it, good enough to fake a shorter, less dashing Captain Blood.
• Graham Chapman. The Brits have got us beat when it comes to classic Pirate-speak, and Yellowbeard has so much flamingly funny talk you can pick and choose, but I'll stick with my man Graham.
• Robert Shaw. He's always talking out of the side of his mouth in Swashbuckler, which makes it easy to talk like him.
• Geena Davis. She doesn't talk like pirates usually talk in Cutthroat Island. All I have to do is talk like a rough and ready lady.

Our friends at Popeater have their own suggestions, and there's a great list at Rob Ossian's Pirate's Cove. To celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, what movie pirate will you be talking like?

It's late at night, you've had an adult beverage or two, you fumble with your keys, stumble into your living room, snap on a lamp, and wham! You're face to face with a great white shark, ready to eat you. The latest Jaws collectible isn't quite life-size -- the shark in Steven Spielberg's classic was described as a 25-footer by Quint (Robert Shaw) -- but it's big enough to throw a decent scare into the unsuspecting. According to a press release (available at Dread Central), the "Bruce NTT piece is a full-length nose-to-tail maquette and dwarfs Sideshow's latest rendition at a little over 3 feet."

This looks pretty awesome. Maybe I could just run around with it, scaring the neighborhood kids. Self-described "finfan" Mike Schultz says he's spent years researching the project; he's a Missouri 911 operator by night and an artisan by day ... No detail, tooth, or scar was ignored in the process. Spielberg's art director Joe Alves has also been brought into the project as a consultant to ensure its attention to detail." Schultz even details which original prop shark inspired his work: "This model represents the more detailed and slimmer 'platform Bruce,' post Shark City build, but pre-waterlogged/damaged Bruce depicted later in the film." Glad we got that cleared up!

The model is scheduled to be manufactured as a licensed, very limited edition collectible, to be available next summer to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the release of Jaws. More information will be available at Operation Orca. Schultz thinks this could be "the ultimate conversation piece." Personally, I think you're gonna need a bigger living room.

"How the hell can you run a goddamn railroad without swearing?"
-The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

"I got 99 problems, and a bitch ain't one."
-The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

About as loud as Joseph Sargent's original was lean, Tony Scott's take on The Taking of Pelham 123 is more indebted to his name than its own, all restless shots and relentless cuts, ticking clocks and roving maps, a stream of shouting and shooting and speed-ramping and slow-motion and all that jazz. The conversations are cranked up, and the confrontations are amped up, but to what end? Scott whips out the familiar frame-blurring techniques that have ostensibly served him well in the past, but his flair tends to instead rob a crackerjack crime thriller of an inherent momentum that has served it quite well over the span of almost four decades.

It's not far to assume that all remakes will disappoint by default. I've come to learn that we get one Dawn of the Dead '04 for every ten of Prom Night '08, but more importantly, I've learned to be a bit more grateful for those that do work, because they are no less ours to enjoy. However, judging by the new trailer over at Yahoo! Movies for Tony Scott's take on The Taking of Pelham 123, that approach cannot eliminate skepticism entirely, which is what this trailer filled me with, entirely.

Hiring the more spastic Scott sibling to helm a movie that mostly takes place on a subway car held hostage doesn't seem right, which is why this piece is filled with roaming cameras as a truck crashes into a car, Denzel Washington clashes with John Travolta, a motorcycle crashes into a car, Denzel's facial hair clashes with Travolta's facial hair, so on, so forth...

And the original (Walter Matthau vs. Robert Shaw! And that theme!) and its dry wit appear to have instead been reduced to that one line about milk and a climax likely more comparable to Speed than Pelham '74. But hey, I can't say for sure until I actually see more than two minutes of the thing, and having been surprised by how much I enjoyed Scott and Washington's Deja Vu after sitting through its trailers, I'll try and bite my tongue until June 12th.

(On the flip side: if you have 105 minutes to spare, I may be able to help you see things my way...)

As a lifelong fan of Jaws, you can imagine what a treat it was for me to recently conduct an in-depth interview with the four producers of the forthcoming Jaws documentary, The Shark is Still Working. Jake Gove, who is the founder of the popular Jaws website Jawsmovie.com is one of those producers, and the others are Michael Roddy, Eric Hollander, James Gelet. Our interview covered a wide range of Jaws-related subjects, touching not only on the content of the documentary itself -- it's currently seeking distribution, but we got an advance copy, and you can read Cinematical's review, which is up today -- but also on the impact of the film in general and legacy that it has left to future generations of moviegoers. We talked about the film's legendary special effects problems, the personality conflicts between the cast members, the film's sequels, and most importantly, the fact that this documentary owes much of its existence to the online movie world, which has a rabid Jaws contingent.

James: That was Eric and myself. We've been making documentaries for quite a few years, and we were just sitting down and watching another documentary that somebody else had done -- it was somebody that we had known. These people had never done one before at all. They decided they wanted to do it, and they had the wherewithal to finish it, and Eric and I really admired them for that. Right around the same time, and completely unrelated to that, we had been invited to participate in Jawsfest, because we owned some props from the movie and Eric turned to me when we were watching a documentary and said 'what would be a fun documentary we could do?' and doing one on Jaws just seemed like such a no-brainer, because we were going to be going to that Jaws fest festival and we're big fans of the movie anyway. So that was kind of it.

The original idea was that it was just going to be about the festival, period. It was going to be much more literally, a Trekkies for Jaws fans. Pretty quickly after that, we were talking to Michael about the project. He was very interested in participating as well, and because of his connections to Universal, he was able to start talking to some of the heavy hitters involved with Jaws, and just kind of hit the pavement and get us some big interviews. Once that happened, obviously the vision grew and it went from being a documentary on Jawsfest into being 'hey, we can do the ultimate retrospective and talk about anything and everything Jaws, if we want to and if we work hard enough, so that's what happened.'

Jaws is not a perfect film, like some say -- I tend to agree with Peter Benchley that any dummy should know that a compressed air tank will not explode like an oil refinery if punctured by a bullet -- but flaws aside, Spielberg's masterpiece is, I believe, a rather important and uniquely American work of art. The idea of a small-town flatfoot realizing that his duty requires him to step on a boat and head off to sea is a metaphor that not only resonated with WWII veterans in the 70s, but still resonates today with anyone who's had to leave the comforts of home to go confront a threat. Also, with its entire story circling down to that amazing moment when the grizzled old seadog Quint has gotten a look at the beast he's going to be confronting and decides to unpack and assemble a fearsome harpoon, the film strongly echoes Melville, as well as all the other literature and art that's been inspired by America's centuries-long quest to tame the Atlantic ocean. This is one of our touchstone movies that won't go out of style until people have lost their fear of sharks, the ocean, drowning and the unknown in general -- in other words, never.

Respect for Jaws from the opinion makers in film academia has not come easily, however. The AFI's list of the Top 100 American Films, compiled in 1998, gave Jaws the questionable ranking of #48, behind such titles as the dated anti-war film The Best Years of our Lives and the entertaining but not exactly earth-shaking Bogey-Hepburn adventure The African Queen. Since then, the astronomical growth of the Internet and the general democratizing of cultural taste-making that it brought has allowed for a rebellion of sorts against Jaws' place of relatively low esteem in film theory. Case in point: the website Jawsmovie.com, which went live in 1995, and has since grown into a sophisticated forum for legions of Jaws fans of all stripes to come and express their love and admiration for the film. Now, the creator of Jawsmovie.com, together with three other producers, has taken things to another level, producing The Shark is Still Working, an epic documentary about all things Jaws -- the making of, the fan community, the legacy, the whole damn thing.