Celebrating its 40th anniversary, Steven Spielberg's Jaws has recently been re-released for limited screenings around the country. An iconic American film if there ever was one, it's been credited as the one that started the summer blockbuster trend that continues to this day. Upon its release it was among the widest distributed films up to that point, shown on over 450 screens at once. There was a large marketing campaign that included several television advertisements and other tie-in merchandise. All of these things are now the norm for summer blockbusters that are released by major studios, but in 1975 this was pretty much unheard of. At that point the summer was the dumping ground for a number of movies, much like the months between January and April are now, and it wouldn't be surprising to read about how many industry insiders were predicting that Jaws would become a box office bomb based on its release date alone, not to mention its notoriously troubled production.
The disaster movie is among the most predictable kind that Hollywood can offer an audience. In the 1970s, at the height of their popularity, these kinds of films would attract A-list talent and end up becoming the highest grossing release of its year (such was the case with The Towering Inferno). More recent successes, such as Roland Emmerich's Independence Day from 1996 and The Day After Tomorrow from 2004, have only increased the scale and stakes of what audiences can expect from the genre, ranging from alien invasions to extreme global warming scenarios. Brad Peyton's San Andreas keeps the stakes big, but instead uses a somewhat plausible scenario (an enormous earthquake hitting the West Coast) and exaggerates it to an Emmerich-sized popcorn extravaganza. Unfortunately, Peyton's film was released at a time just shortly after recent earthquakes had devastated Nepal, and watching the San Andreas fault cause such huge amounts of destruction while audience members chew on popcorn can create an uneasy feeling in the theater.
To say that I had low expectations going into Terminator Genisys would be an understatement. The marketing campaign was less than inspiring, which included a laughably bad Entertainment Weekly photoshoot and a trailer that gave away the film's big twist (one of the promo posters did this as well). Add the fact that the film was slapped with a PG-13 rating instead of the R desired by fans of the series, as the first two films were, and things weren't looking too promising for the fifth installment in the Terminator franchise. In the weeks leading up to it's release, however, something came out of left field. James Cameron, the director of both The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, gave his seal of approval for the film in a featurette released by the studio, a clever marketing ploy that was clearly meant to win over the many skeptical fans of the series. In Cameron's opinion, this was the 'true' third film in the series, dismissing both Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and Terminator Salvation and saying that he believed this new film was the one that really honored his two originals. Now, it has finally arrived, and the question is: Does the film live up to Cameron's praise, or was he just doing it as a favor for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the studio to soften the negative buzz that had been building for months?
Recently there has been a new 4K restoration made for Carol Reed's classic film noir The Third Man, based on the screenplay by author Graham Greene (who subsequently published the work as a novella). The studio Rialto Pictures has released the film in a number of cities across the country for a limited engagement of this new restoration, and will continue to be shown until the end of the summer. I had never seen this film before, despite having heard so many great things about it over the years. I'm also a pretty big fan of Orson Welles, and he's the mysterious character on each poster (the one to the left of this paragraph being what's used for this recent re-release) so I decided to go check it out for myself. Luckily, as expected, I enjoyed it immensely and found the story to be engaging from the moment it began. Like any good film noir it combines a memorable score, morally ambiguous characters, and a very moody post-war Vienna as its backdrop for the story at the center.
If Badlands showed the promise of Terrence Malick's career with a remarkably unique "lovers on the run" crime film, 1978's Days of Heaven is where the director really started to find his style that would only continue to evolve with each subsequent film. Many of the director's trademarks - such as the painterly cinematography, beautifully composed musical scores, an emphasis on the natural world and how it overshadows human beings, etc - are placed at the forefront in this film, whereas they were comparatively minimized in his feature debut. The film opens with a title sequence that immediately sets the tone for the film, using the song "Aquarium" by French composer Camille Saint-Saens to evoke an ethereal atmosphere that will hang over the remainder of the picture. This sequence also informs the audience with a sense of the time period that the story takes place in, showing photographs of the American working class as well as Woodrow Wilson during his presidency, indicating that this is set not long after the turn of the century.
