Jaws Is Simply The Best Movie Ever (Today)

The question is simple enough. "What is the best movie you have ever seen?" My answer has changed over the years. I can understand the infatuation with Orson Well's great Citizen Kane (though Well's The Third Man may even be better). For years, my answer was Mike Nichol's The Graduate, an homage to a generation who began to see things differently (my generation). I was partial to Woody Allen's Annie Hall for a long, long time.

But for the last 10 years or so, my answer has been to the best movie I ever saw is Jaws - the 1975 Steven Spielberg thriller that captivated a nation and kept countless people out of the water. Jaws is the perfect movie with every scene, every still image, every line of the movie forever frozen in my brain. Who can forget John Williams intense musical score where it is virtuously impossible to get two notes into the title theme without instantly recognizing the menacing theme from and equally menacing movie? Who didn't jump out of their seats the first time they saw that corpse head pop out of the bottom of the fishing boat that was just used as the shark's chew toy? And who can't forget that absolutely great performances of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfus?

Jaws is a movie that has no flaws and I'm a person who absolutely does not like horror movies or thrillers. That's just it. There is nothing in there anymore that scares me after seeing it probably a dozen times or more. What I see now when watching the movie is Steven Spielberg's craftsmanship at every turn. Spielberg has gone on to direct many great, great movies but Jaws stands above the rest in my book. 

I remember Ed Bradley interviewing Bob Dylan on 60 Minutes years ago. Bradley began to read the lyrics to one of Dylan's more intricate songs that he wrote years ago and compare it what he was currently writing. A somewhat befuddled Dylan plainly said that he could never write songs of younger years because age changes everything. And that's how I look at Spielberg's work. His last movie, Lincoln, was outstanding but it wasn't what Jaws was or could ever be.

We gotta get a bigger boat.