Look out! Sharks! Yawn

Beautifully shot, edited, and creepy, Open Water still manages to bore. Shark movies are scary/intense because sharks are scary/intense, so filmmakers are immediately granted a lot of natural tension and they don't have to work so hard for effect. There's not much more that can be done with these movies, and not much new or interesting happens here. It is, I must admit, a bit pleasurable to watch whiny yuppies get menaced by undersea carnivores, but not for more than 15 or 20 minutes, and if you make me spend more than that with these losers then I want to see them get shredded or escape dramatically, and the pay-off in this film blows ass. This was what Big Red, Luscias, Cha and Big Red's sister were watching when I got home from work last night.




I'm digging it--on a par with Fitzgerald's short fiction, and I don't make that comparison lightly. Really excellent stuff. More when I finish the collection, but imagine Fitzgerald writing about Drieser's underworld as well as Jazz Age RMF's (Rich Mutha Fuckas).