Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Obligatory Celebrity Obit



Roy Scheider died this week and the predictable pre-written obits were run. Apparently he was very sick and repeated calls to the Olson twins didn't help. TorStar ran this studio still from Jaws. Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw are hunting a ginormous huge shark...which is why they're looking up at the sky. SKY SHARK! Maybe there was a witch writing something bad about Richard Dreyfuss in the sky. Or the camera was just at a bad angle.

Most of the Obituaries I read claimed that Jaws was his best movie and cited the famous line, you're going to need a bigger boat. There were a lot of good lines in that movie not to mention Richard Dreyfuss over-acting and Robert Shaw's horrible Scots accent. In my opinion, the Shark wasn't nearly mean enough. I didn't really like Jaws. And generally I enjoyed all the cheesy disaster movies of the 70's. They should have had Shelly Winters in Jaws, swimming across the bay, crying and kvetching.

I thought Scheider was a much better actor in 2010. This was Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2010 was not directed by Stanley Kubrick, so even though the novel is very good the movie sequel was not. In spite of that Scheider was good in this movie. They tried to imitate the feel of the original by having a lot of very esoteric dialog. The dialog in that movie was jaw droppingly retarded. Scheider pulled it off though, but always had kind of a smirk on his face, kind of like Shatner in Star Trek. You know the look: O for God's sake this is so ridiculous, but the kids do need college. Humor me. I did Shakespeare, remember that.

Good actors in bad movies is the Hollywood success story. Lets not mess with it. Please recommend this post

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