Spring Break Shark Attack has everything you could want from a movie of that title, except for sex, violence, and excitement.  What it can offer is belabored metaphors about chastity, a spoof on Desperate Housewives, and college kids who enjoy pretending to read books more than drinking and clubbing.

Spring Break Shark Attack was first broadcast on the CBS network on March 20th, 2005, strategically placed to compete with a rerun of Desperate Housewives.  In a bold move, the film begins without credits and depicts four bikini-clad thirty-somethings lounging and drinking on an inflatable raft on the vast open sea.  They complain about their kids, mention how they miss their dead friend, and one even utters the line, “Peace and quiet: It’s what we’ve been desperate for.”  Then, suddenly, with plenty of warning, the pseudo Teri Hatcher is dragged under the water and mauled by an unseen assailant, leading the other three to panic and promptly fall out of the raft after her.  Presumably as a result of this ingenuity, Spring Break Shark Attack was a commercial success like no one could have predicted: For that night it tied Desperate Housewives as the highest rated show in the 9pm slot.  Its near-victory was short-lived however, as Boston Legal surpassed it from 10-11.  Even Muhammad Ali lost some fights.

The central story follows Danielle Harrison (Shannon Lucio), a college student and virgin with overly protective parents who sneaks out of the house to join her friends for Spring Break in Florida.  Upon arrival, she’s teased for her intact hymen and pale skin.  The more ethnic of her two friends emphasizes the point, “Danielle, you’re pale.  Even for a white girl.”  The blonde friend concurs.  They head to the beach where they meet up with a couple of rich scumbags.  Blah blah blah.  Danielle meets the noble townie Shane (Riley Smith).  Blah blah blah.  I can hardly stand to think about the love triangle that forms between these two and Rich Scumbag #1 (Justin Baldoni, the guy who can breathe underwater on Heroes), let alone relate it to you.  Suffice it to say, the rich guy tries to date rape Danielle but gets caught in the act by Shane, and much later gets eaten by a shark.  The only moment in the whole film worth remembering is the one about ten minutes before the end in which Danielle falls backwards onto a loaded harpoon gun and accidentally impales Shane through the shoulder.

All you really need to know is that sharks are a metaphor.  College boys are attracted to the blood of virgins; sharks are attracted to the blood of everyone.  And like the college boy, the shark seems really nice at first, but then you realize something’s wrong and you’re passing out in his fins.  The next morning you wake up and your friends all say, “Man, you were so wasted with that shark last night.  What happened?”  And you say, “I don’t know.  I don’t remember anything from last night.”  Then you look down to find that you’ve been disemboweled and you are missing everything from the torso down.  The shark has taken your innards with him to the bottom of the sea and is bragging about it to any fish that will listen.

It’s hard to say at whom this film is targeted.  The title and the gratuitous amounts of cleavage and female butt-shots suggest the tried and true immature teenage boy demographic.  But the almost complete absence of gore (people get dragged under the water and fountains of blood go off), the coming of age plotline, and the classic “rich handsome boy vs. sweet, brave, smart, and poor handsome boy” rom-com dilemma suggest this is more for a particular kind of seventh grade girl.  You know, the ones who wait in line overnight to see the (supposedly abstinent) Jonas Brothers or who’ve read each (abstinence-promoting) Twilight novel seventy times.  In fact, Spring Break Shark Attack premiered in the same year the Jonas Brothers became an official band and Twilight was published.  Perhaps future historians will look back on 2005 as “the beginning of the end of pre-marital sex/good art.”  That is the only conclusion I can come to after that rather excruciating 88 minutes.

Bonus Review: Here’s an opinion of Spring Break Shark Attack provided by someone who looks for Chuck Taylors in movies and writes about it.

PS. Watch the whole movie online! I wish I had!

Most of the films I’ll be writing about I will have seen at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. The Film Forum is a nonprofit organization that puts on screenings or live events nearly every night of the year, conducts filmmaking workshops, rents out filmmaking equipment, and provides money and/or facilities to local filmmakers. In my opinion they’re one of the best organizations I’ve ever known. That said, I will try not to let my overwhelming bias for the NWFF overcome my “journalistic integrity” about the films they are showing.

The first film I’ll be reviewing will be playing at NWFF until Thursday night, and it’s called Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived.

As you may have noticed, the poster proudly announces that this is “A Film By Koji Masutani,” as though this is a brand name we recognize and trust. Perhaps this is a subtle part of Mr. Masutani’s alternate reality experiment.

Putting this minor bit of pretension aside (which very well may have been an offense by the ad department and not Masutani himself), Virtual JFK delivers a rather interesting history lesson theorizing that had President Kennedy not been assassinated in 1963, the lion’s share of the horrors of the Vietnam War could have been avoided. The on-screen narrator (and producer of the film) Professor James G. Blight argues that the temperament of a president matters, and that for better or worse, Kennedy and successor Lyndon Johnson were different kinds of people and different kinds of presidents. Blight proposes that these divergences of character made a difference as far as how many deaths were incurred by both U.S. troops and the people of Vietnam.

The aesthetic of the film is lifted straight from Errol Morris, master documentarian of the Oscar-winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, for which Professor Blight was a “special advisor” along with Virtual JFK producer Janet Lang. Blight’s narration is presented in Morris’ trademark “interrotron” fashion, though Blight is standing and in black and white, more akin to Morris’ Apple “Switch” commercials than his feature films. Likewise the string-heavy original score by Joshua Kern seems to attempt to provide a mood similar to the one composer Philip Glass created for “Fog of War.” And naturally, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appears in both films. Not his fault this time.

Though not outright stated in the film, Blight has an agenda so obvious one expects him to tap on the screen and say, “Get it? Obama is Kennedy, McCain is Johnson (or worse, Nixon). Go vote.” On the off-chance that he might be misinterpreted, Blight has since written at least one article on the subject in which he is a bit more explicit.

It may sound like I hated this derivative and didactic documentary. In fact I did not. The film makes smart use of archival footage (though there are some seemingly pointless repetitions), including great excerpts of Kennedy working the room at press conferences, and rarely-heard audio recordings of the 35th president arguing with advisors such as Generals Taylor and LeMay. The film also builds a reasonable-sounding argument that Kennedy, having avoided war so frequently (six well-defined times by Blight’s count) during his first 1000 days, would have continued to avoid all-out war given the chance in Vietnam. The archival footage and the historical evidence are the strengths of this film.

That said, why is Professor Blight the sole expert visibly consulted in this film? Wouldn’t the film present a more useful discussion of the subject if the producers had also recruited historians who believe that Vietnam still would have been the quagmire it became under Johnson? For that matter, why not approach scholars who agree with Blight? Without opposing or corroborating voices, how much of Blight’s unprovable hypothesis can we accept at face value?

Again, this film is not without merit. Masutani delivers a well-paced, interesting documentary that perhaps over-lionizes Kennedy as the anti-war sage who held his ground against the urgings of nearly every advisor, and makes a tragic hero out of Johnson, the poor fool who gave in and suffered a great emotional toll as a result. Though I may not like how they made the argument, Blight and Masutani convinced me. Mostly. I still can’t quite accept “counterfactual” evidence as actual evidence.

2.5/5

The Anthology itself is an awkward amalgam of self-aggrandizing biography mixed with previously unseen concert footage mixed with a relatively shallow analysis of the cultural revolution(s) of the 1960s. It is interesting to see the Beatles assess themselves and their own fame and infamy. Paul McCartney makes it a point to draw attention to every musical innovation they made (the feedback at the beginning of “I Feel Fine” for example) and revels in each little development in the band’s personal evolution (the third-person format of “She Loves You,” a break from the pattern of “Love Me Do” and “From Me to You”). George Harrison comes across as witty, honest, and humble. When Paul mentions regretting that he talked down to George as a kid and even as an adult because he was “always a year and a half younger at school,” George, in a separate interview replies, “He’s nine months older than me. He’s always been nine months older than me.” Ringo seems fully aware of how lucky he was to fall in with such a talented trio and neither overstates nor understates his role in the band. John, partially because of his absence, remains a bit inscrutable.

The pacing of the series is understandably imbalanced. The third episode focuses exclusively on the period of time between the Beatles’ arrival in New York in February of 1964 through July of the same year, during which time they appeared on Ed Sullivan, toured extensively, and released A Hard Day’s Night (film and soundtrack). In comparison, the eighth episode chronicles July 1968 through “The End,” which spans almost two years, three albums (one of them a double), the Let It Be documentary, and a considerable amount of interpersonal and financial drama. I can see why the Fab Four would want to dwell more on their heyday than on the times when they couldn’t stand one another, but it makes for a rather less interesting documentary. Success is great for those that have it, but an audience craves conflict and drama (not to mention I personally tend to like their mid-era and later albums more than their early ones).

The first few episodes are very heavy on footage from live performances, which I’m sure in 1995 must have seemed like a treasure trove to pre-Youtube era Beatles’ fanatics. But today, five or six renditions of “She Loves You” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” feel redundant.

A highlight to me has to be the shots in which Paul is answering questions while helming his yacht. There is no apparent reason for Paul to be doing this interview on his boat, aside from the fact that he wants to brag about the fact that he owns and knows how to operate a yacht. The whole image is a bit ruined by the fact that you can see the sound guy crouching a few feet away from Captain Sir Paul.

If you have the time and inclination, this is a pretty cool doc, but the first few episodes can be difficult to wade through because you will almost certainly get sick of “Twist and Shout.”

That’s right. Francis Ford Coppola’s formerly unquestioned dominance has been shattered. As one wise commenter said on the Dark Knight message board: “The Godfather had its boring parts and the villains wasn’t as good.” Indeed. Abe Vigoda as Sal Tessio doesn’t instill the same sort of dread in audiences as Heath Ledger does as the Joker. There is one sequence, however, in The Dark Knight that I suspect was directly lifted from The Godfather. For those who have seen neither film, I will not spoil them both (the two greatest films in history) here in one post, but suffice it to say, three murders (or attempted murders) are intercut quite effectively in The Dark Knight, playing out very similarly to the much-lauded baptism sequence in Coppola’s film.

But putting aside The Dark Knight‘s unreasonable reputation and comparisons, it actually is a phenomenal film.

Yes, what they say is true. Heath Ledger will win an Oscar for his performance. A deserved Oscar? We’ll still have to see who the other four nominees are, but he’s pitch perfect in the psychotic role. A year and a half ago, I doubt most of us could have imagined the actor who played the stern, mumbling gay cowboy from Brokeback Mountain could play the manic, sinister clown that terrorizes Gotham City with equal aptitude (I hesitate to say ease, in light of the toll the latter film took on him).

But if we can mourn the loss of a gifted actor in Ledger, we can also celebrate Aaron Eckhart’s stand-out performance as Gotham’s District Attorney Harvey Dent. To date, Eckhart hasn’t turned in a better performance than this one. Without getting too much into Dent’s role and evolution as a character, the entire story is essentially his. Batman feels underwritten, and under-explored. Bale does a fine job as usual (though sometimes I think Batman should be able to speak more than five words between heavy breaths), but he feels oddly like a junior partner in the trifecta of justice comprised of Batman, Dent, and Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman in a solid performance).

Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces Katie Holmes as Assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes, Bruce Wayne’s longtime flame, and Harvey Dent’s serious girlfriend. Though Miss Gyllenhaal is the more talented actress of the two, she’s sadly wasted here. She is little more than a plot device. She exists to depress or embolden our heroes. To fall out of buildings and be saved. Her chemistry with Wayne and Dent never feels authentic. Rachel functions much as Scarlett Johansson’s character did in Christopher Nolan’s previous film The Prestige. She is there to tempt two powerful men, but is decidedly at their mercy. The Nolan brothers (Chris and Jonathan) know a thing or two about action and drama, but they don’t tend to write women very well.

As taut and thrilling as the screenplay is, at times it’s bogged down by its “this is my philosophy” format. The Joker tells you (to paraphrase), “I believe in chaos and the evil in people’s hearts.” Dent tells you, “You make your own luck,” and later that “chance is the only justice in the world.” Alfred (Michael Caine) tells you that “men must do good, even if they are hated for it.” And so on and so forth. But the soliloquies can be all-but overlooked, thanks in no small part to the talented stable of actors delivering them and the breakneck pace of the action.

So now the final question: Is Batman George W. Bush? Should we be like Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and accept illegal wiretapping (to the extreme in The Dark Knight) just this once for greater national security? Is the President actually doing an amazing job, and he’s just taking the fall for some other guy who is our real “white knight”? I don’t think there’s a simple one-to-one correspondence between Gotham City and Post 9/11 America, but the themes and ideas of what it means to live in terror are very much there. The Nolans should be commended for giving us a superhero movie that deals with these issues maturely and thoughtfully. And then of course, everything blows up.

I’m likely to use this blog both for reviews as well as general essays on films and filmmakers, but I haven’t really set the format down in stone. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I (hopefully) enjoy writing.